Go Tony Harris!
Tony Harris has donated $350 to my head shaving fund! Man, you must really want to see me balder than Britney’s hoo-hoo. Good onya mate. Makes Molly’s $10 look puny. 🙂
As for the rest of you… shame on you. Shame. Shame. Shame.
The Dead PC Blues
Oh joy – yesterday by main PC, the desktop, whimpered and died. Found out today that my C drive died. So i bought another one and now I’m going to spend the next 24 hours (if I’m lucky) installing Windows XP (cuz none of my so-called ‘friends’ at Microsoft have given me a freebie copy o Vista to “review”), XP Service Pack 2, XP patches 1 – 2978, Office, Adobe Everything, etc etc etc. GRRRR.
It shouldn’t be this hard.
I want a PC that need nothing installed.
I want a PC where components don’t die every few years.
I want a PC that is designed to humans, not one where I have to learn what SATA means.
I want a PC that will recognized there is a keyboard plugged in so I *can* actually hit ENTER to installed the frakkin operating system.
It’s 2007. We’re supposed to have HAL by now. My PC doesn’t even know I have a keyboard plugged in. What went wrong…
Russell Hates My Ads
Russell Buckley hates the GoDaddy ads that Jason Calacanis and I are running.
I agree with Russell that we need to come up with better models for podcast ads. Playing the same ads on every show can get annoying. Radio plays the same ads over and over as well but, because they have so many ads, I guess the repetitiveness is less obvious than a podcast that only carries a couple of ads. At this stage we’re hoping that the audience is accepting the premise that we are producing these shows for no money and most of us aren’t gangsta-rapper rich like Jason or Curry or Doug Kaye.
I would love to find better models, so I’m completely open to feedback, criticism and suggestions!
Shave My Head
Inspired by Miriam, I’m going to shave my head for the World’s Greatest Shave 2007. For those who haven’t heard of it its a charity event for the Leukemia Foundation. The idea is that people sponsor me to shave my head and the money is donated to the Leukemia Foundation.
The Leukemia Foundation supports patients with leukemias, lymphomas, myeloma and related blood disorders. The Foundation provides free support services including:
If you would like to sponsor me you can do so by credit card here. Just click on sponsor an individual, then enter my name and state (Cameron Reilly, VIC) and enter how much and your card details. Easy!
To make it more interesting:
– if I raise more than $1000, I’ll put a video of the event up on the blog
– the person who puts up the biggest donation can, if they choose, come over and do the deed
Nontheist U.S. Congressman Outs Himself
As mentioned here last week, Democrat Congressman Pete Stark from California has outed himself. Wonkette says he is a “Unitarian”.
“When the Secular Coalition asked me to complete a survey on my religious beliefs, I indicated I am a Unitarian who does not believe in a supreme being,” Stark said. “Like our nation’s founders, I strongly support the separation of church and state. I look forward to working with the Secular Coalition to stop the promotion of narrow religious beliefs in science, marriage contracts, the military and the provision of social services.”
Unitarian Universalism describes itself as creedless, meaning that it has no underlying authoritative statement of religious belief. While some members believe in God, not all do.
I still find it almost unbelievable that in 2007 this is such big news but there you have it. Do you think this means the rest of the US politicians actually believe in mythical beings? Or that they are just too scared to front up? Either way, it’s pretty scary. The LA Times says:
A USA Today/Gallup poll last month found that only 45 percent of respondents said they would vote for a “well qualified” presidential candidate who was an atheist. Ninety-five percent said they would vote for a Catholic candidate, 92 percent a Jewish candidate and 72 percent a Mormon candidate.
I would love to run a similar survey in Australia. Perhaps the Secular Coalition needs an Aussie operation?
And what’s with this “nontheist” crap? What’s that?
According to this blog:
a nontheist is someone who does not accept a theistic understanding of God, as described in the preceding paragraph. Such a person may reject all understandings of God, may embrace certain non-theistic understandings of God, may find God language useful and rich in trying to describe their experience of the world but not true in a literal sense, may believe in certain non-material, transcendent realities that have little in common with the common understanding of the word “God.†An atheist falls within this understanding of nontheist, as does an agnostic, a humanist, a Buddhist, and many Quakers who find the whole practice of labeling our belief systems an unfortunate distraction from genuine religious living.
We definitely need a better marketing term than “nontheist” or “atheist”. I prefer “rational”. Or “sane”.
SUNSHINE – preview screening
I know one projectionist who isn’t having a good day. I am sitting in a special preview screening of danny boyles new film sunshine and halfway into the movie it started to go backwards. it was we had suddenly jumped into a david lynch film. it took ten minutes for the cinema folks to notice and stop the screening. the worst news? director boyle is here for a Q&A. so is star rose byrne. at the moment the audience is just taking an unscheduled intermission. UPDATE: its 30 minutes later and we are still waiting. apparently the projectionist discovered that the next reel was reversed as well. ouch. someone is going to get their ass kicked over this. I bet popcorn sales are up though. UPDATE 2: well another half hour has past and we are still sitting here. thank god I have my ipod and dopod. Popcorn Taxi, the organisers of the event, are still trying to get it sorted but have offered everyone a refund if they don’t want to hang around. I’m sticking around for the Q&A. They should have brought Boyle out to chat to the crowd while we wait….
FINAL UPDATE: when they finally got the film re-started after an hour, it was the wrong reel. so they let it run for ten minutes then stopped it for good. Boyle explained that the reels are all in the wrong order and there is no way of telling which order to run it in without him watching all of it first. So we are doing Q&A without having seen the film….
FINAL UPDATE 2: I’m home now. Popcorn Taxi, who do a great job putting on these events in Melbourne, told everyone that they will get a free ticket to see SUNSHINE when it opens. Danny Boyle and Rose Byrne did a great job at the Q&A. She seemed more pissed off than he did – perhaps because it was the first chance she had to see the finished film as well. She said that when she first realized the reel was “fucked up” (her words), she had to leave the cinema. I thought Boyle would be majorly pissed off but he seemed to take it in his stride with good humour, which made the audience relax. I guess I can’t do the review of the film that I hoped to but I can say that the 35 – 45 minutes of it that I saw – out of order – I very much enjoyed. I look forward to seeing it properly when it opens.
GDAY WORLD #212 – BITCH SESSION
Tonight is the first edition (if you don’t count a couple of false starts) of GDAY WORLD BITCH SESSION. Your chance to come on the show and bitch to me about anything you like. I’ll try to do one of these each week. You can bitch to me about stuff that’s been on the show recently, the show in general, life in general, or just bring your own baggage. Your daddy didn’t love you? Bitch to me about it. You can’t get laid? Blame me. You need marital advice? I’m your man.
Tonight was a pretty slow start. I started off by myself, nothing wrong with a little onanism, so I indulged and chatted about Priscillian, the first Christian “heretic” executed by Christians in 385 CE. His crime? He said Christians should lead more ascetic lives, avoid marriage, and retreat from “worldly honors”. At the Council of Toledo in 400, fifteen years after Priscillian’s death, when his case was reviewed, the most serious charge that could be brought was the error of language involved in a misrendering of the word innascibilis (“unbegettable”).
Then I’m joined by Urbaer and we talk about religion. Are Taoism and Confucianism religions or just social philosophies? Should Christianity become a social philosophy and leave behind it’s supernatural aspects?
I also show Urbaer the new TPN homepage which went up tonight. This is version 3.0 of the TPN homepage and we’ve been working on it, on and off, for about 10 months. It’s a relief to finally have it up. Version 2 lived WAY beyond it’s due by date. Mano and his team have done a great job pulling this together.
Finally we are joined by Molly and the Randulo, an American in Paris, who tells us about his wine podcast and the 24-hour podathon he is running on TalkShoe this week to raise money for third-world entrepreneurs.
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The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
Ewans kicking SXSW butt!
Ewan Spence is podcasting his little highland heart out at SXSW (on TPN Tech Conf and now also at SXSW Baby) and he just did an interview with Harry Knowles, the legendary film nut behind Ain’t It Cool News! That’s awesome! I’ve been a fan of Harry’s for years and years. Well done Spencester!
EVH Unchained
To take your mind off the news today that Eddie Van Halen has checked himself into rehab, I present this clip of him performing his porn soundtrack “Catherine”. Just try not to watch the last few seconds where he throws his guitar on the floor and takes a swig from a bottle of Johnny as he shambles out of the studio…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpACZS0vSO4]
The Age coverage of the Burgess interview
Garry Barker’s article from our chat with Phil Burgess is in today’s Age (Business section). Online version here.