by cameron | Nov 24, 2006 | Uncategorized
Des Paroz sent me a link to this article in The SMH that talks about how inaccurate the food labels in Australia are.
Julie Robotham reports:
Of the 19 products that claimed to be low in fat or calories, 19 per cent exceeded the fat content published on the panel while two-thirds contained more calories than specified – in one case by nearly three times.
So it’s even worse than I imagined. I knew you couldn’t believe it when a food product is claimed to be “lite” or “low fat”, for reasons I’ve discussed here before. This new data just makes it even harder though to know how many calories you are consuming and what percentage of those calories are coming from fat. In a country where Type 2 Diabetes and obesity are on the rise, we need to do a much better job of
a) educating people how to eat sensibly and
b) making sure that food manufacturers accurately report what their foods contain
This should partly be the responsibility of the government, partly of the media (congratulations to Fairfax and Julie for getting this story out) and partly it lies with us, folks. We need to vote with our dollars. Perhaps someone should start a “website of shame” that highlights companies who aren’t giving us accurate information.
by cameron | Nov 23, 2006 | science, Uncategorized
From David Berlind over on ZDNET:
Judge Leonard Davis ruled that a patent granted in 1996 to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, is valid. The patent describes the implementation of several aspects of the 802.11a and 802.11g wireless standards developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The court also ruled that Buffalo Technology, a small maker of Wi-Fi routing gear, had violated this patent….
…..More than 100 companies could end up paying royalties to CSIRO for use of the technology, claimed Daniel J. Furniss, a partner at Townsend and Townsend and Crew, the law firm representing CSIRO.
I know people who know people at CSIRO. I’ll try and hook up someone for the show in the immediate future to get to the bottom of this. It seems that not only did CSIRO invent insect repellant, gene splicing and myxomatosis, they also invented wifi. Hot damn. Maybe they can explain why I can’t get my modded xbox to talk to my new netgear router and therefore have to waste lots of blank dvds to get the latest episodes of Weeds, Heroes and Studio 60 onto it.
by cameron | Nov 23, 2006 | Culture Jamming
Some quotes to think about…
So by the end, they (MSNBC) were ordering us, if we booked one guest that was anti-war, we had to book two that were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we had to have three on the right. At one meeting a producer suggested booking Michael Moore and she was told for ideological balance she would need three right-wingers. It became more of a nightmare, as the war got closer; and then we all got terminated three weeks before the invasion was launched, and it was purely political.
– Jeff Cohen, noted US TV media critic
“You can educate the people about what is happening in the world, but you can’t ever go to impose a will which is not their own,â€
– Venezuelan-U.S. Attorney, Eva Golinger, author of new book, Bush vs. Chavez: Washington’s War Against Venezuela (Monte Avila Editores, 2006, Caracas).
Q. How has Microsoft Australia demonstrated that it is innovative?
A. Microsoft Australia values innovation very highly both internally and also in terms of our engagement in the local economy. ….. ……..
Another good example has been the joint venture that Microsoft sponsored with PBL to create the start-up company NineMSN which has been an innovative and successful new company in Australia.
.. Microsoft Australia CEO Steve Vamos. My spies at Microsoft Australia don’t agree with that statement. I keep getting told that most of the innovative people have left the company in the last few years and that the company is getting more and more like IBM every day. NineMSN is an example of innovation? Jamming together Australia’s biggest media giant with the world’s largest software company nine years ago?
Steve also mentioned Victoria.Net which (I believe) was the idea of one of my old managers, David Sajfar. Great idea for bringing together Microsoft’s developers in the local market but… cmon… it’s a portal. Those two things were Steve’s top examples of local Microsoft innovation? A nine-year old JV with Packer and a portal? Sheesh. Buy Google stock.
by cameron | Nov 8, 2006 | Podcast
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So tonight I went to see Lou Reed play a gig in Redwood City, an hour by train outside of SF. It was HUGE!
As some of you know, back in Jan 2005, as we started TPN, I published my dream list of people I’d like to interview on my podcast. At the top of the list was… Lou Reed. Next was Noam Chomsky. Well I got Noam out of the way about a year ago. And tonight…
While I was standing in line I started chatting with some of the other folks in the line, and eventually realized that if I can’t get a chance to actually interview Lou Reed, I can at least interview his fans! So I pulled out my iPod asked the people who they were, where they came from, what they did for a living and why they were going to see Lou. I kept doing the interviews while we were sitting inside the theatre, waiting for the show to start. I also recorded 99% of the show, but that’s just for my personal collection. 🙂
In the interviews I met a fine art photographer, a sci-fi author, a landscape gardener, the manager of a comedy club, a psychiatric nurse, the president of a search engine optimization company… and a german. A fair cross-section of Lou Reed fans. I’ve always suspected Lou Reed fans are more intelligent than your average rock fans.
By the way, the show was brilliant. No drums, no keyboards, just Lou on guitar and Rob Wasserman and Fernando Saunders both playing bass! The set list included mostly tracks from Songs For Drella Magic And Loss and The Raven. There was one VU song, a brilliant version of Femme Fatale, and one encore from New York. During the show, Lou announced that the Democrats had taken back the House of Reps and he, along with the crowd, clapped and cheered for about five minutes. Lou made a comment about how convenient it was that Saddam was sentenced the day before the US Elections and then said how he’d like to see George Bush hung. I think the election result must have buoyed his spirits because he did TWO encores – the first was a new track called “Gravity” and the second was “Dirty Boulevard”. Anyway… this show is about the fans, not a review of the concert, but let me just say that it was awesome. And today there was news that he is touring Australia again next month!! And will be performing the entire Berlin album!! Rock on.
Enjoy.
by cameron | Nov 8, 2006 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
Update: Kevin Maney has posted about the night here. Apparently it was called The Second Annual Tech Industry Charity Jam. What a great idea. According to Kevin:
The event was underwritten by iLike, a new service from Garageband.com, and Garageband CEO Ali Partovi kicked in a couple songs on stage.
Last night a group of Aussies, including the folks from Atlassian, Touchstone and Tangler, with a few American hangers-on, herded together into a bar called 21st Amendment (apparently the 21st Amendment to the US constitution was the prohibition law) to watch the Melbourne Cup. Well that was the plan. It was supposed to be running here live on some Spanish racing channel at 8.15pm West Coast time. However when the big moment came – nada. Our cup runneth empty. We had to resort to using someone’s laptop to find out who won the sweep.
Afterwards I went to a semi-private shindig I’d been invited to at Annie’s Social Club. This is apparently a semi-regular thing where a bunch of tech industry journos, including guys like Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief, Red Herring, and Kevin Maney from USA Today, have a jam session. They bring their equipment and have an open stage. I mainly went because I heard John Wood was going to be there. John used to work at Microsoft in Australia and I met him a few times early on in my career. For the last few years he has been running a start-up called Room To Read with the mission of getting books, education and scholarships into the hands of kids in Third World countries. He’s just published a book about it, “Leaving Microsoft To Change The World“, and he was at the event doing a book signing. I went along to re-introduce myself to him and organize to have him on the show. Watch for that soon.
So anyway I get there, chat with John a while, then go out back to check out the band. On my way I run into Randall Leeb-du Toit again. I ran into Randall in the middle of the city yesterday as well. San Francisco is a small town. Either that or Randall is Mr Everywhere. He snapped this photo of Kevin and I watching the band.
Then I spotted Cathy Brooks on stage singing lead vocals. Cathy is the Chief Podcaster for The Guidewire Group and we’ve met a few times over the years. She was on the same panel as me at last week’s ANZA Tech event. I didn’t know she could sing! She has a terrific voice.
Someone else with hidden talents (okay, not so surprising) is Renee Blodgett. She was single-handedly taking up the dance floor, grooving and bopping and generally keeping the rest of us amused by doing the Charleston. Renee’s clients, the Israeli eSnips babes (as apparently they are known), were there, watching their PR representation tripping the light fantastic. Yael, their CEO, took some photos which I hope she’ll put online. eSnips just raised $2M in Series A funding and are announcing their new Micro-Portals at Web2.0 today.
Later in the evening the band did an AC/DC medley (TNT/Ride On) and which forced me up to the stage where I sang lead vocals for a couple of tracks, including Back In The USSR and Cocaine which had Kevin Maney on guitar. I don’t think there will be any photos of that though. And yes, the sunnies were on. It’s been… oh… 18 years since I’ve been on stage in front of a band and it felt strangely…. right. I need more.
O’Reilly’s Web2.0 conference starts today but it’s sold out so I can’t get in. I’ll be going to the after parties though which, I’m assured, is where the networking all happens.
Today I’m catching up with Mark Smallcombe. Mark is now VP of Engineering at InsiderPages, one of Bill Gross’ companies, and I’ve known him since he was a BizTalk client back in the days when he was CTO at Deloitte Australia. He also was a senior executive an Sensis briefly. He’s been here a year now I think.
Everyone over here has told me that getting funded in Silicon Valley is all about “who you know”. You don’t just walk into a VC and say “G’Day”. You have to get introduced, preferably by someone they trust, like someone else they have already funded, or an angel investor they have worked with in the past.
Oh and my XDAII had it’s 2nd meltdown in as many weeks last night. Did a hard reset so I lost ALL of the data on it. It did this to me after I’d been here a few days, causing me to lose some appointment information. Fortunately I had backed it up regularly to my SD Card since then but it’s still a pain in the ass when it hard resets. You have to re-install all of your apps, restore your data, figure out what the delta is from your last backup, etc. I think it’s time to go back to paper. Technology sucks.
