Damnation – tagged by Our Man in Tokyo for this meme.

1. Three things that scare me:
Spiders
Losing my vision
The feel of gravel

2. Three people that make me laugh:
The Chaser guys
Bill Hicks
Lenny Henry

3. Three things I hate the most:
Bad grammar
Cucumber
Jingoism

4. Three things I don’t understand:
Faith
Fundamentalism
Liking cucumber

5. Three things I’m doing right now:
Writing some articles
Worrying about money
Thinking about R

6. Three things I want to do before I die:
The Trans-Siberian Railway
Retire
Become omnipotent

7. Three things I can do:
Make R laugh
Drink like a fish
Read very, very fast

8. Three ways to describe my personality:
Neurotic
Insecure
Egotistical

9. Three things I can’t do:
Drive
Dance
Exercise

10. Three things I think you should listen to:
Mozart’s Requiem
David Bowie – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
Paul Kelly – Under the Sun

11. Three things you should never listen to:
John Howard
Advertorials
Sermons

12. Three things I’d like to learn:
Another language
Patience
Ability to have a drink WITHOUT lighting a cigarette

13. Three favourite foods:
Vietnamese Rice Paper Rolls
Chicken
gyu tataki

14. Three beverages I drink regularly:
Milk
Bourbon
Absolut Citron

15. Three shows I watched as a kid:
The Goodies
Monkey Magic
Doctor Who

16. Three people I’m tagging (to do this):
Ruth
Ms Cynic
Beth

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This is a fascinating little article. Especially these lines:

Federal Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock says the control orders are necessary to protect the Australian public.

He says the matter must be treated seriously.

“The issue is about protecting the Australian community, not punishing a person for an offence proven beyond reasonable doubt,” he said.

“And if you work on the assumption that only those people who could be convicted of an offence could be the subject of a control order, you wouldn’t have control orders.”

Yes, exactly. Thanks to the AG for pointing out exactly why control orders are a massive abuse of the legal system and common law – innocent until proven guilty. Idiot.

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So more news on the publishing front. It appears my publisher might have something I am interested in. It’s a big project but one that sounds fairly interesting and I have already had some ideas that I’d like to try. But until I have further news it’s all secret squirrel stuff.

Also R reviewed a CD by some chap called David Ford (I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I’ve Caused). It’s wussy music (sort of intelligent James Blunt) so naturally I loved it and downloaded it to my iPod. I particularly liked the lyrics to the song – Cheer Up (You Miserable Fuck) – which I have reproduced in part below.

And don’t, don’t you think that it’s time
You said, “Hey, this one is mine”
Maybe do what you want to do?

‘Cos you, well yo are no fun
And I’m so dumb
But please let us not be lonely, again

And you, you wear your mistakes
And I know mine
But please let us not be lonely, this time

Cheer up, you miserable fuck
This has gone on long enough
And I don’t want to hear anymore

‘Cos it you wait for the day
You find your thinking bends to straight
You’ll be waiting for a long, long time

Oh you, well you are no fun
And I’m so dumb
But please let us not be lonely, again

And you, you wear your mistakes
And I know mine
But please let us not be lonely, this time.

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The Melbourne 2008 bid for Linux.conf.au was successful. I was very vaguely involved in it – volunteered some ideas and may have volunteered some time on the organising side of things. Probably something to do with the conference papers. So that’s excellent news for the bid. The competition was pretty stiff – Hobart put in a damn fine bid – but we prevailed.

Still trying to work out what is happening with options for a new book/re-write of older book. Very frustrating but I need to schedule my time for the rest of the year. I did take on a couple of new projects – maintaining Gotmail and writing BlockSSHd (though I confess there aren’t a lot of new features I intend to add). These projects do take some time but I still have some spare time and a desire to keep writing. I have some ideas for a book – more monitoring topics, a book on logging interests me, and obviously some security concepts – I’d love to do a book on security metrics. But we’ll have to see.