I don't know why I do this to myself, but I read Christopher Pearson's article in the Australian about gay marriage. The crux of his argument against gay marriage is its impact on national fertility. He claims that

Among the reasons the Greens are so keen on same-sex marriage is that they want to reduce the population and drive down national fertility. Their refusal to discriminate positively in favour of heterosexuality and uphold the distinctive value of normal marriage shows their political project yet again for what it is: a dead end.

How does Pearson think allowing gay marriage would affect fertility? Is he suggesting that some heterosexual couples will be so put off marriage if homosexuals are allowed into the club that they will refuse to marry themselves and would certainly not have children out of wedlock? Or perhaps he thinks that some gay couples, faced with the prospect of not be allowed to marry, will be do drawn to the holy state of matrimony that they will turn straight, marry someone of the opposite sex and have children?

Even if the question of marriage was just about children, which it clearly is not (is he about to outlaw child-rearing outside of marriage or for infertile heterosexual couples?), Pearson's logic is fundamentally flawed.

Good Morning,
 

Am Rev Morison and  i will like to order some of your candle for  our  church and  i will like  to know the types  you have now  in stock and also tell me the trypes  of major credit card you do accept as  your payments..
Regards

After I posted about my challenges navigating Microsoft licences I received further contact from Microsoft via twitter (@Windows7AU) with the name of a person to contact directly at Microsoft (Michael). Michael seemed much more motivated to help me than anyone I'd spoken to up to that point. Not only that, he even called me back as promised (more than I'd experienced up to that point).

Unfortunately, the news Michael had for me was not great. Since I had bought an "Anytime Upgrade" (just a product key in a box) not a plain old "Upgrade" (which comes with a disc), the technical guys told him there was nothing that could be done. If only I had bought an Upgrade (which do, of course, cost about A$40 more). Although JB Hifi had specifically told me that they could not take returns of software that had been open, Michael at Microsoft encouraged me to try, saying that JB could return the Anytime Upgrade to their distributor and that he was happy to speak to them to smooth the way.

JB Hifi fortunately obliged and so, forty odd dollars and another trip up the road later, I was able to "upgrade" Home Premium to Home Premium. Of course I ended up paying more than I would have done had I simply purchased an Anytime Upgrade right at the start, but having installed a fair amount of additional software and tweaked the setup to my liking, I really could face wiping everything and starting again (not to mention the fact that I'd have ended up paying more on my monthly data bill anyway).

For me the most interesting thing about the whole experience, apart from the challenges of licenced software (and to all those advocating the use of Linux instead, I have also been battling with installing eeebuntu on an SD card for the same machine, but that's another story), is the power of twitter. I managed to get much better service from Microsoft by posting here and communicating with @Windows7AU on twitter than I did by calling phone support.

If you go into a shop and jump up and down making a fuss, you are likely to get some attention. After all, your antics may be bad for their business, putting other customers off. If you ring a call centre and make a fuss, no-one else knows what's going on. Social media like blogs and twitter allow you to tilt that balance back in your favour!

Thank you to Michael at Microsoft and @Windows7AU for smoothing the way for me.

Navigating Microsoft licensing can be painful.

The other day I bought a new netbook with Windows 7 Starter pre-installed. I used it briefly, noted that an Anytime Upgrade to Home Premium was available for A$119 but thought I didn't need that because I already had a DVD with a full copy of Home Premium (not an OEM version). Mistakenly I thought that, like Office and a lot of other software, the licence would be good for one desktop and one lap-top. So, I blithely followed these instructions from Microsoft on how to copy a DVD to a USB key, booted the netbook from the USB and installed Windows Home Premium.

It all seemed to go smoothly, the installed happily accepted my product key and I busily started setting everything up the way I like it, installing all of my applications (in the process using up 70% of my monthly downloads with my ISP one week into the month!).

A few days later, a message popped up saying my copy of windows could not be activated. A bit of googling revealed that I could not, in fact, use that product key on two machines. One of my options was to enter a new product key, so I thought I should bit the bullet and spend the A$119 for the upgrade. Not so easy!  All I could find online was a home premium upgrade for A$199. Of course, I still had the CD that came with the netbook, so at this point, I could have wiped the netbook clean, reinstall Windows 7 Starter and upgrade from there, but I was very reluctant to do so given the time it would take to set everything up again, not to mention the fact that I have very little data left for the month with my ISP.

So, instead I called Microsoft, figuring that they would be able to sell me a product key. Apparently not. Initially I was told that there was nothing I could do, but then I got onto a superviser who recommended going to a retail store, buying an upgrade to Home Premium and using the product key from that. Today I tried that: JB HiFI sell the upgrades for A$135. At this point, I wasn't worried too much about the extra A$15, I just wanted it all fixed.

I paid my money, entered the key and tried to activate. No go! The error this time said that the key could only be used for an upgrade not a clean install. Given that this was what Microsoft had told me to to, I was not happy and having just forked out A$135, I was not about to spend another A$299 to buy another full copy of Windows Home Premium, thereby spending A$434 (more than the netbook) on what I felt I should not have to pay more than A$119 for.

So, I called Microsoft again as well as exchanging tweets with @Windows7AU but made no progress. As far as I am concerned, I have paid for Windows 7 Starter and I have paid for an upgrade to Windows Home Premium, so Microsoft should be able to find a way to give me a product key to make it all work. I won't hold my breath.

As I am writing this, the CD that came with the netbook is copying onto a USB key and I suspect that I will have to bite the bullet and flush away what I've done and start again from scratch.

UPDATE: posted the resolution to this saga here.

Our two older boys are very keen on Club Penguin, but so far mean parents are forcing them to make do with free accounts. They know full well that there are things that they can only do if they pay for membership. Mr 6 was explaining for Mr 4 how much it cost to become a member and he decided that he would pay himself using coins from his moneybox. So he then posted a number of coins into the memory card reader of the laptop in an attempt to pay for membership. It would seem that they understand more about how the virtual world of computing works than the physical world!

Fortunately, the laptop did not seem too upset. Once the coins were removed, it rebooted and all seems well (so far at least).

I've been benefitting from using open software of all sorts for years. While I have been active on discussion forums for some projects, I have never actually contributed any code...until now! It's hardly the most sophisticated bit of coding, but it's a contribution, which gives me a wam fuzzy glow.

I've been playing around with the StatusNet microblogging software for a while (the software behind identi.ca), running a discussion forum called the Mule Stable. One of the big challenges I've found running a microblog is managing spam. These days the big sites like twitter and identi.ca live with the fact that spammers will get onto their sites and rely on users blocking and reporting them. What this means is that the public timelines of these sites tends to have a lot of spammers in them. However, since not many people bother to visit the public timelines, this is not much of a problem. It's only when the spammers start using @ replies that they can get really annoying.

However, for the Stable, the user-base is still small enough that most people would just read the public timeline and so spammers are very obvious when they appear. Putting in a recaptcha distorted word question cut out quite a few spammers, and requiring email validation cut out some more, but there were some that still got through...a lot of them Russian for some reason. So, I wrote a simple plugin for StatusNet which "sandboxes" new users by default. This means that while they can still register and post messages, these posts do not appear on the public timeline, so only people subscribing to them (initially no-one!) would see the posts. I can then un-sandbox legitimate users.

This is a fairly manual process, so would not be feasible for large sites, but since I thought it would be very useful for other people running small sites, I sent what I'd done back to the developers. It has now made it into the 0.9.x of StatusNet!

StatusNet is a great initiative and so it feels good to give something back, if only in a very small way.

The tight 140 character contraint imposed by Twitter imposes an economy of style that has proved a strong stimulus to abbreviation conventions. The most successful, of course, has been the @ reply, so much so that many people assume that Twitter invented it themselves, when it was in fact invented by users and then officially adopted. The hashtag (#) ranks next in importance, but after than the conventions quickly become less universal. Even the venerable "RT" for re-tweets has been the subject of some controversy.

One intriguing development has been an attempt to develop an "official" Twitter abbreviation syntax. The result is called "nanoformats", since it comes with the imprimateur of microformat.org but is even shorter. It does seem horribly ambitious to make anything official, unless you own Twitter and it's all a bit too ugly for me with its heavy use of colons. But I wish them luck.

In the meantime, I've been using a different set of conventions that I first came across last year in a blog post by Chris Messina. Chris is more modest than the nanoformat crew and explains his reason for writing up the syntax quite simply:

Well, I never expect that anyone will follow my lead, but if they do, I’d like to spell out what I’m doing so they can more or less get it right.

I thought I'd give them ago and they've stuck with me. I like them, so here they are in case you've ever wondered what I mean by them:

/via

This is used after quoting someone (usually on twitter, but not necessarily). Rather than reviving the RT versus via controversy linked to above, I use this alongside RT. I will only use RT for a full and exact quote, but allow minor editorial liberties (e.g. correcting spelling or ... elision) and maybe some additional commentary with a /via. Here's an example:

Might take a look at this: Complete first chapter of my new book Web Analytics 2.0 is here: http://zqi.me/8YmTeI /via @avinashkaushik

(here's the original tweet).

/cc

These days the "@ reply" has morphed into the "@ mention" and it is very handy for getting a few people to see a tweet. The /cc tag is used if you are replying to one person but want to copy some others in too.

@engin_eer Waleed Ali is quite good, but with Miranda and Peter, it won't be much fun. #qanda /cc @franksting

/by

When linking to an article or post by someone, this is a handy way to attribute it.

"Mule Stable demo video" http://bit.ly/bZVIOF /by @stubbornmule

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to do this and some are even very similar (e.g. cc/ instead of /cc), but these work for me.

I should add that I called this post "Microformats for Microblogs" because I'm using the same conventions on identi.ca and, of course, the Mule Stable.

After a particularly ferocious lion-like roar, Mr four-and-a-half said "Ow, that hurt my breath!". I said, "You mean it hurt your throat?". He replied, "No. It hurt my......words".

I first began compiling a list of concerts I have been to as a journal on Last.fm almost three years ago. My recollection for the early years is patchy and I am sure I have missed quite a few, but a bit of googling has helped with a few dates. If anyone can remember going to something with me that is not on the list, let me know!

Pre-1986
1980 Studio audience of Countdown - Gore Hill Studios, Sydney. "Live" bands included Mi-Sex and Moscow was #1 on the charts.
1982 (approx.) Radiators and Australian Crawl - A paddock somewhere outside Nowra, NSW
1985 (approx.) Sandii and the Sunsetz - Tivoli, Sydney

1987-1991 - University
1988 Pink Floyd - Entertainment Centre, Sydney (30 January)
1988 Nick Cave reading from And the Ass Saw the Angel - Mandolin Theatre (23 March)
Shriekback - Holme Building, Sydney University
They Might Be Giants - Holme Building, Sydney University
1990 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Enmore Theatre (July)
1990 Depeche Mode - Hordern Pavillion, Sydney (31 August)
Soul II Soul - Hordern Pavillion, Sydney
Run DMC - Hordern Pavillion, Sydney
Painters & Dockers - Tivoli, Sydney
Hunters and Collectors - Wentworth, Sydney Uni
Andy 500 - Strawberry Hills Hotel (a few occasions)
Tex Perkins - somewhere on Parramatta Rd, Sydney
Concrete Blonde and Andy Prieboy - Selinas, Sydney
The Hummingbirds - various occasions
Crowded House - Wentworth, Sydney Uni
The Crystal Set, Mental as Anything - Selinas, Sydney
Dream Warriors - Paddington?, Sydney
Faith No More - The Venue, Dee Why, Sydney
Bob Downe - Metro, Sydney

1991-1995 - England
1992 The Sugarcubes - Brixton Academy, London
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brixton Academy, London
1992 Shonen Knife - The Junction, Cambridge (4 December)
1992 Directions In Groove - Kinsellas, Sydney
Ministry - Brixton Academy, London
Salt n Pepa - The Corn Exchange, Cambridge
The Cramps - The Corn Exchange, Cambridge
Colonel Hathi's Dawn Patrol - Cambridge on various occasions at various locations
The Cure - The Corn Exchange, Cambridge
Ministry - Brixton Academy, London
They Might Be Giants - Islington, London
Shriekback - Islington (The Garage?), London
1994 The Ramones - The Astoria, London

1995 onwards - Back to Sydney

The Whitlams - Atlas, Sydney
1998 Portishead - Hordern Pavillion, Sydney (27 April)
Kaempfert Zone - Surry Hills?
They Might Be Giants - Metro, Sydney
Massive Attack - Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Jungle Brothers - Metro, Sydney
Bob Downe - Metro, Sydney
The Cruel Sea
TISM
The Radium Club Hepsters - Various dates and venues
The Prodigy and Regurgitator - Selinas, Sydney
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Metro, Sydney
2000 Ute Lemper - Sydney Opera House
Monsieur Camembert and Marsala
2004 Taraf de Haidouks - State Theatre, Sydney (January)
2004 Elvis Costello - State Theatre, Sydney (November)
2006 U2 - Telstra Stadium, Sydney (10 November)
2006 Camille O'Sullivan - Sydney Opera House
2007 Les Hurlement d'Leo, Waiting for Guinness - Hyde Park Barracks (11 January)
2007 Gotan Project - Sydney Opera House
2007 Monsieur Camembert - The Vanguard, 2007 Sydney
2007 Monsieur Camembert & Guests - The Vanguard, 2007 Sydney (14 April)
2007 Herbie Hancock - State Theatre, Sydney (23 April)
2007 The Radium Club Hepsters - Darling Harbour Jazz & Blues Festival, Sydney (11 June)
2007 Monsieur Camembert - The Factory, Sydney (23 June)
2007 The Bad Plus - Jazz Cafe Camden, London (18 July)
2007 Camerata Portena - Sydney Opera House
2007 The Stems, Radio Birdman, Hoodoo Gurus - Enmore Theatre (14 September)
2007 Laurie Anderson - Sydney Opera House (22 October)
2008 Pink Martini - Riverside Theatre, Sydney (8 January)
2008 Sufjan Stevens - State Theatre, Sydney (13 January)
2008 The Triffids - Metro, Sydney (17 January)
2008 Rufus Wainwright - State Theatre, Sydney (30 January)
2008 CocoRosie - The Factory, Sydney (8 March)
2008 Jesus and Mary Chain, The Rakes - Enmore Theatre, Sydney (2 April)
2008 DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist - The Big Top, Luna Park, Sydney (19 April)
2008 Sonny Rollins - Sydney Opera House (1 June)
2008 Barry Adamson - The Factory, Enmore, Sydney (20 June)
2008 Emir Kusturica and the no-smoking orchestra - Sydney Opera House (29 June)
2008 The Breeders - The Metro, Sydney (2 August)
2009 Gary Numan - Enmore Theatre (5 March)
2009 Lee Scratch Perry - Sydney Opera House (11 June)
2010 Antony and the Johnsons - Sydney Opera House (31 January)