The weekend.

Another weekend upon us. And it's a scorcher, headed for 36 today. The evap is getting a good workout and it's really nice inside. I had plans to go for a ride to a mate's near the beach and other sorts of things but after last night I don't feel up to much so I might just sit inside and do sfa. Spent the morning watering the pot plants and the garden (after a massive down-pour on Wednesday it's amazing how quickly things dry out in the heat), mowing the lawn, fertilizing, and constructing a frame to support the tomatoes. I also had the bright and in hindsight totally obvious idea of keeping the mint plants out of the full sun so they develop large soft leaves rather than the small hard ones.

And so to some thoughts of the moment ...

Just because I like to see microsoft suffer i've been watching what happened with their latest phone release ... and by what limited data is available it sounds like it was a bit of a flop. Ahh well and good. Over a few beers last night I was chatting to a mate about their weird-arse advertising campaign and I think I worked out what they were trying to do. Someone looked at some charts - one showing the total population of the world, and the other showing how many people already owned a jesus phone or alternative. Then they decided they'd try to sell to the biggest slice of the pie by making fun of the minority rather than trying to steal those customers. At best, the adverts seem to be aimed at those of us who think jesus phone users are wankers - but we're just not interested in the technology itself, so you're not going to sell anything to us (and incidentally I don't see any problem with fishing a phone out of a pissing trough - these things get dropped all the time and it's not like you're going to leave it there). Then a big section of the market will never be interested in such devices because they're simply too complex and although they might appreciate the adverts (if they understand them at all) they are not potential sales. So that leaves the other section of the market - call them the 'aspirational smart-phone' buyers - who want to `grow up' and become jesus phone owning wankers themselves one day. And you're not going to sell to them by pointing out they want to be jesus phone owning wankers. But apart from all that if people are going spend a bit of their hard-earned on a 'cool gadget' they want it to be 'cool'. And that has never been microsoft apart from a pretty small band of retards who don't know any better.

Despite efforts to shut it down, wikileaks seems to be soldering on. Good thing. The media coverage of their latest spill, particularly here in Australia where we expect things to be a bit better than the US, has been utterly appalling. Apart from a couple of alternate viewpoints published on the ABC blogging site (aka 'the drum') the media (and all TV channels) have been in one voice - roundly condemning wikileaks and running full fisted with the US state department line of how terrible it all is and how illegal it has to be. And the australian pollies have all but given up the idea of australian sovereignty with their limp wristed kow-towing to the USA, basically offering an australian citizen up for whatever the yanks want to do to him. Disgraceful gormless arseholes - I can't imagine any of the actual cables that might mention Australia could paint a worse picture of their gutlessness than they're doing by themselves on prime-time TV. At most they're probably worried that Australians might realise how irrelevant their country is in the wider scheme of things and that we don't actually 'punch above our weight' in any sense.

Oh and the whole 'wikileaks is just a CIA/mossad conspiracy' thing is exactly the sort of 'grass roots' conspiracy you'd expect the CIA to use to discredit them. It does sound plausible at first, but ... then a bit of common-sense prevails.

And apparently the fishing fleets have run out of new fisheries to plunder. That is utterly mind-blowing when one considers just how big the oceans are - they are 2/3 of the surface of the planet. Even with centuries of logging there are still areas of un-touched rainforest - which has only ever covered a fraction of the land surface.