Why? Why not?

For a while now, I’ve been reading the ‘Opinion’ section of the Herald online each morning. A continuing source of amusement has been Miranda Devine’s columns about the aftermath of September 11. It’s fascinating to see the sort of mentality who argues that the US has every right to respond with whatever means it feels necessary, and that whoever questions this are ‘traitorous’ or even better, ‘handmaidens of Osama bin Laden’.

In her most recent article, she’s defending Mundine because he apologised for saying that the US had some role in causing the attacks. Because he apologised. I’m sure that if he had stuck to his guns Ms Devine would be ready to pronounce him a handmaiden as well.

It’s really quite scary for Australia, I think, that people attempting to add a reasonable level of sanity to public debate about sensitive issues are castigated in such a strong way. I guess it’s symptomatic of the general slide towards conservatism in Australia since the Howard government has been in power. More on that another time.

A great quote from the SMH Letters Page:

Having decided not to vote for a party that’s shallow, cynical, poll-driven, scare-mongering, war-mongering and xenophobic, I’m left with one small problem: who’s left?

Beautiful.

Well, I’m working on improving Pilotblog. Planned features:

Single program that grabs memos from your Palm that are in categories with the same name as your blogs, and posts them as separate posts to the respective blog.

For example, for this blog (Inocuo), I will have a category in the Memo application on my Palm called Inocuo. The program will connect to the Blogger backend (details), get a list of my blogs, discover the existence of the blog Inocuo and its respective category, and publish whatever memos are contained therein as separate blogs.

Because of limitations of Blogger, I will need to timestamp Palm posts, as I have explained before.

I guess I should wing this to the bloggerDev list too. Well, I’ll post updates as I do them.

Thanks to the good folks (or person, I’m not sure) at BlogBuddy for a more convenient posting method. I’ve added their link button to the bottom of the page.

I’m feeling a lot less silly than I was when I wrote the last post, but the fact remains that I do now have a cable modem at home! Sorry if sensitive readers are overwhelmed by the excitement of that last statement. Currently, I’m at work, but tonight I’m going to give online CS a go, and no doubt get absolutely caned. Learning curves are a wonderful thing.

I keep forgetting that I have the whole Palm->Blogger thing working now. I’ll try and remember to post random musings instead of just thinking them from now on.

Wow. After the previous post, I realised I hadn’t posted since September 29! So much for attempting to be a semi-regular website-posting guy. Ah-well, should be easier once the loving of sweet sweet pseudo-broadband is rammed into the arse of my computer like a mega-funky alien probe.

I might get to update my wallpapers page too.

Coming soon to Inocuo:

An encounter with a stomach bug of some sort, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love my intestinal tract.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve been sick for a few days, and since my only net access is at work at the moment, there has been no net for that time either. Noooooooooooo!

However, this deleterious circumstance is due to be ameliorated on Saturday, when a helpful cable-modem guy comes to install a broadband connection to Rommel’s PC. At which point I will rip out his installation and put it in a Linux box so we can all share the goodness.

I suspect that as I get more involved with Telstra’s so-called broadband, a king-size rant will be brewing. A small one is already on the way, but I think I will let it build for a while.