Tim's Bits and Pieces

My first knife was one of those cheap, nasty Swiss Army Knife clones. I loved it when I first got it, but I grew out of it and it was such low quality that it put me of the whole idea of "Swiss Army Knives". I'm pleased to say I'm now cured of this dislike; I recently saw a cheap ($22.45) Victorinox Tinker on eBay. I'm glad I did; it's currently my very favourite knife, though so far I've avoided the temptation to name it "Vera". :-)

Continue reading...

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), the bane of the Linux "evangelist", is not restricted to anti-Linux materials: Iran Uses Novell and Microsoft Software to Make Bombs. Oh, noes! Microsoft and Novell must be evil!

Continue reading...

Their saying it as she got of murder, but really she's going to jail in China for defending herself against an attempted rape. Now I know almost nothing about the Chinese justice system except that it seems to be pretty harsh (execution for tax evasion for instance), but I suspect Ms. Deng will never leave jail alive. Also the Chinese have no qualms about using prisoners as slave labour, so you can thank Ms. Deng for the donation of her labour to the worthy cause of keeping the price down on your next pair of Nike shoes.

Continue reading...

The Chief Commissioner of the Victorian police force is suggesting criminal charges for cops who use offensive nicknames for their internal investigators (the Ethical Standards Department). I posted a comment on the article, but they never published it, which I've included below.

Continue reading...

Wonderful, looks like the Labour government wants to reintroduce compulsory student Union payments for university students. Back to forcing people to pay for services they don't want or need. The student union never did anything useful for me; the only time I was ever in a situation where I might have needed a union, I was forced to join a special "club" as part of being a student, the student union was the actual problem. Sure they called it a union, but it was basically just a special club I was required to join, even if I never used any of their facilities. Isn't the whole point of unions preventing such things? To my mind mandatory union membership is a violation of the very purpose of unions.

Continue reading...

You might be wondering what a web comic, Narbonic, and an intelligence organizations, ASIO, have to do with each other; the answer of course is absolutely nothing whatsoever, I simply don't have enough to say for two separate posts.

Continue reading...