Insert Clever Title Here

The biggest grip I have is that all those that are opposed to the carbon tax are self interested groups. The groups that the Libs are playing a stuck record for. “Big Fat Tax”, “Toxic Tax” etc.

Yes, in the future Coal will go the way of the dinosaur… ironic really. And yes during that transition there will be some pain. Do I feel for those that may lose their jobs, yes I do. But then do we shed a tear for those that worked in the Asbestos mines, the mine that for what at one time was seen as a great product until we work out it was killing people. Of course we don’t. We shed a tear for those that are still paying the price of working with the material. Sure it is not as easy to launch a class action against carbon, but that day still may come.

Australia has a chance to push into green tech. Then by exporting that tech and not just our expensive dirt we could even make a lot of money. Creating new jobs and new opportunities that can value add, delivering benefits not just for a few, but for all of us.

If people could stop thinking about just themselves and start thinking about future generations we could get somewhere. If the rise of the interest group and lobby group that is focused only on a small set of people that will gain from something, things could improve for all of us. What if politicians didn’t drive a wedge “a few are going to be worse off”, yes a few will be, but how many of them can afford a $10 a week increase in something, 99.99% of them I’d say.

Lets pause and reflect on the Telegraph operators, Switchboard operators, Cotton pickers, textile makers, the poor paddle boat operator or the coal foot men on a steam train. Perhaps a moment of reflection for, candle makers, wagon makers and also the related industries like wagon wheel repair men and horse shoe folk. Newspaper print setters ( and possible even Newspaper barons ), the poor Milkman, the Iceman, but lucky for him the Dunny man. A pause for the Flint knapper, the whaler. Or even a pause for all those that have lost jobs in the coal industry from automation, machinery and cost cutting.

Tags: Annoyances // 1 Comment »

For those that don’t follow the noise that is my Twitter stream I thought I would update the blog with the latest on the Cubs…

Holy crap…  the cubs are 7 days old already….

Seven days on, Mrs Wolfcat is finally home.  She got to come home yesterday and so has a few days rest before the cubs arrive home.  Which is a big question that people keep asking. Latest thinking is “late” this week.  When they come home is dependent on them.  Certainly we aren’t going to rush this.

Zara’s feeding tube came out on Thursday last week, Erin’s just yesterday.  But that means that they are suck feeding which is a great sign.  However, the issue with Erin is that weird heart rate thing that was noticed In utero hadn’t gone away.  It is very intermittent and the doc has got her on drugs.  They are confident that she will grow out of it in the next year anyway and it doesn’t seem to be upsetting her.

So we are doing feeding runs for the girls for the rest of the week whilst we run around trying to get a few more things organised at home.

I’d like to thank a few people as well.  The staff at the Jessie Mac Hospital, and the staff Monash Children’s have been amazing.  Our OB Danielle Wilkins has been wonderful as well.  I’d also like to thank my boss and co-workers for being amazingly supportive and flexible during this time as well.

The girls are doing really well and I am still ten kinds of terrified especially holding something so small and vulnerable in my hands.

Lots more photos on Flickr as well….

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14 years in development (with plenty of practice) the collaborative Wolfcat installation project of 2011 was successfully completed this morning.

Wolf and Cat are pleased to announce the Wolfcatcubs are finally at large.

Please join us in welcoming into the world, the latest members of the Dale/Cocklin Clan, our beautiful new twin baby daughters

alphabetically

Erin  Amelia Dale  Cocklin
and
Zara  Augusta Dale  Cocklin

35 weeks 5 days gestation
delivered by caesarean section

8:38am   Monday   4^thJuly   2011

Jessie McPherson Private Hospital, Melbourne.

Erin  weight:  2.750 kg (6.06 pounds)   length:  48cm ( 18.89inches )

Zara  weight:  2.560 kg (5.64 pounds )   length:  48cm ( 18.89inches )

~ All involved are doing well ~

(though at least one of us has been scarred for life by the experience)

Further details as they become available, together with perhaps far too many photographs to be found at… bit.ly/wolfcatcubs

(Erin with the Red Cap, Zara without a cap, Mum with the blue cap )

for good luck, please feel free to wet the babies heads

or even smoke that fine cigar (twitter says a cigar for each baby is in order apparently)

(I know we will be indulging – guess who is looking forward to which the most)
Erin:

Zara:

… One stunned mullet…

and if you look at the big version of this image you will see that I am actually giving the #wolfcatcubs their first feed, not just standing around.

Erin:

Zara:

Tags: cubs // 45 Comments »

Yep… that covers all I need for the hospital….

And this song… covers today…

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Why oh why do people ask me if I am excited about the arrival of the #wolfcatcubs.  I’m not, there is nothing to be excited about.

Terrified is the best word to describe what I am feeling.  Perhaps it makes people feel better to ask you are excited.  My wife is in hospital with twins coming in under 16 hours.  What is there to be excited about…

For example in no particular order, what if I drop them, what if they aren’t healthy, how will I pay for them, what if they don’t breast feed properly, what if my wife is really crook post op, I don’t have enough leave, what if I drop them ( yes I know I said it twice ), what if I screw up the one chance I have to get a great first photo etc etc etc…..

People have said I will make a great father… how do they know.  I couldn’t organise my way out of a wet paper bag when it comes to domestic duties. About the only thing I can do that is remotely parent related is tell really bad Dad jokes.

See there is a lot to be terrified about.  They will they be cute and will I love them, that is a given (well cute if they take after Mrs Wolfcat, not me).  So I have that covered already….  So back to being terrified I go.

I have a week to finish sorting things around the house, and at least most of the big pieces are in place.  But so many little things… for what will be very little things.

I might be excited next week, but this week while I try and get my head around everything I am just terrifed.

Of course next week I will bring them home… then I will be terrified all over again.

Tags: cubs // 6 Comments »

Well, I thought the nice measured title, reflects the measured mood that I am in at the moment.

Of course I am in a measured mood, I am sitting back on a Friday night with a beer.  A well deserved beer after the day I have had as well.

Yesterday marked the start of Week 35.  So Ultrasound, blood test, BP etc.  And like all great drama’s I didn’t pay attention to the ominous music playing in the background did I.

Test results came back fine for the Cubs, but Mrs Wolfcat is to coin a technical phrase.. “FULL”.  Her body has decieded to slow down, with her BP up, blood work not coming back as good as it should have etc.  So we have moved from the optomistic “Lets aim for Week 37″, to the “you’ve done enough.. Week 36 ( aka thursday ) to the ” We are admitting you in a few hours, pack a bag, aiming for Monday.

So I calmly drove home, and with little fan fair or panic helped get Mrs Wolfcat’s final things together and took her to hospital.

Even after a few hours in the “uber” gymnastic contortionists dream of a bed she is looking a bit more rested, so Monday looks like the day.

Now I have to run around and do all those jobs I still had weeks to do over the weekend.  Worse yet, I am getting instructions on bits of paper on how to do said tasks, which of course leads to fear of loosing the bits of paper.

The camera is charged, fresh batteries in the flash, memory cards emptied, and even a back up camera just in case.

Sometime Monday morning I become a father of twins….  ok… I think I need another beer.

Tags: cubs // 1 Comment »

So, once again I can get my rant on….

Today the Herald Sun picked up the perennial favourite of all newspapers and politicians (well politicians around election time), law and order and public transport.

After an exhaustive FOI request, headline numbers and the shocking statistics of assaults at train stations has come out.

Now, firstly, I must say, for anyone that has been attacked in this way for you I am sure it was a horrific crime and certainly I don’t mean to denigrate what you have experienced.  I am just trying to put it into perspective for the rest of us.

So we will start with the headline.

“Suburban assaults are on track with Flinders St station”

WTF does this even mean.  I think they are trying to have a clever play on words, but it got lost in sub-editing land, and we thought it was bad for The Age…

But moving on as it were… to the first in bold par.

FLINDERS St may be the most dangerous station in Melbourne, but a suburban transport hub isn’t far behind.

OMG you are saying, but that is the busiest station in Melbourne, chances are if you live in Melbourne you’ll get off there at some point.  Better watch your back when you get of the train….

There were more assaults (31) at Flinders St than any other station last year, but close behind the city’s busiest station was Dandenong (28).

OMG again… 31 assaults at Flinders St.  But wait there is something that is missing from the rest of articles text that is only in the image header.  “Stations with most assaults last year”

Now I am sure that the Herald Sun is familiar with the laws around accessibility as well, so I wouldn’t need to tell them that having a vital part of the story only has a graphic which only has a alt tag that says alt=”rail assault” would be a really bad thing.  Also any one that looked at the story say on a mobile phone with out images would get a very very different story.

The Herald Sun obviously forget to put in an FOI request for the number of people that visit these stations each year.  Instead of wasting money on an FOI request a quick Google search tells me that..  and wait for it…

“Over 100,000 people use Flinders Street Station each day.”

So, we are looking at a total of 31 Assaults each YEAR, yes year, not day, week, or month.. but year.  Now compare that to the 36,500,000 people that pass through Flinders St Station per year you will see the scale of the problem. You will notice that that number is MORE than the total population of Australia.  Yes, those 31 assaults are moving into the realms of complete improbability.

That is to say that the chances of assault at Flinders St station are beyond insignificant are in the .000000 kind of range. Or for the mathematically lazy, 1:1 177 419.  The chance of lightning strike is 1:1,603,250, dying from a venomous bite/bee sting 1:1,159,364.  Even more scary, the chance of dying from falling out out of your bed or chair — 1 in 513,142.  So you are 2 times more likely to die from getting out of bed that get assaulted at Flinders St Station. (*These stats from here )

You can run an Improbability Drive on these kind of odds.

Perhaps if the Herald Sun stopped and thought before creating a fear campaign we would realise just how safe and wonderful our country really is.

– Update–

Turns out the Herald Sun did an article on the dangers of falling out of bed.( 28/6/11 )

More than 1600 were admitted to hospital in the year to June 2010 after tumbling out of bed, Monash University Accident Research Centre data shows.

Falls accounted for 43,772 hospital admissions, with people more likely to hurt themselves falling out of bed or slipping off chairs than falling from ladders or trees.

While more than three-quarters of patients went home within a week, nearly 900 died in hospital.

When will the Victorian Government put armed guards at our bedsides to stop this outrage of death and serious injury!

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As Posted on the ABC Tech Site: June 22, 2011

They say a day is a long time on the internet.  Watch a meme unfold and you’ll see what I mean. Image taking your blog, website and business offline for 9 days.  Not just 9 days where you know what is happening, but 9 days where there is scant information and most of the information that comes isn’t from the source.

I am talking about what happened to not just my domain, but 4800 others that have gone and a huge number that disappeared for quite some time.  I was until recently a very happy customer of Distribute IT.  Up until the start of this year anyway.  Sure there had been the odd outage here and there, but nothing too long and too extreme.  In the last few months things had gone seemingly downhill.  A visit to Whirlpool will show the increasing dissatisfaction that people had been experiencing.

Yet all of this was nothing compared to what happened at 5:50pm on Saturday June 11. Whilst the clients of Distribute knew something was up within seconds of this outage quickly updating Whirlpools thread from the previous weekends outage, it wasn’t until Sunday, 12 June 2011 2:35:12 AM that Distribute were to say anything.

“Engineers are at DC working on restoring services asap. Very deliberate, coordinated & malicious attack on DIT network the cause. No ETA yet “ Via their Twitter account.

It felt early on that Distribute had taken the “Sony” approach to corporate communications telling as little as possible and certainly not highlighting what possibly could have gone wrong.

So I lost my email, my little personal blog and really not a great deal.  On Whirlpool I would watch as people told stories of massive advertising campaigns locked in for the long weekend which were vaporised by this outage. I watched as people talked about the fact all Distributes phones were IP based and where taken out as well.  I swore and cursed that I’d lost my personal email, grateful I wasn’t running a business off my website.

After a number of emails and 9 days my worst fears were confirmed, it was all gone.  Everything that I had on that website was lost.  Every email from what will be nearly 2 weeks gone into the ether.

Sure, everyone says, have a backup.  Guess what, I do.  But a backup wouldn’t have helped those businesses that had advertising tied to their website over the long weekend.  A backup wouldn’t ensure that you could find a new host over a long weekend in Australia, and a backup wouldn’t ensure that your settings were in place.

Finally now that Distribute have finally said that the data is gone and that mine and 4800 other websites are gone, I am putting into play my backup plans.

Still I wait 2 days or so for my domain to move to a new host, upload all the FTP content, setup a new version of WordPress, upload my old blog XML document, put in a couple of posts manually that weren’t in my last backup.  I’ll then have to find all the email lists that I have dropped off and resign to them.  Hope like hell I didn’t receive a really important email on an email account I have had for 12 years now.

Yes I have a backup, and yes I have a plan in play to get things backup by weeks end.  But there are a lot of business that may not have, and a lot of business that wouldn’t think to watch Twitter for the only updates for days.

Early on, people said they would leave Distribute not for the “hack” which may well have been out of their control, but simply for their lack of communication.  I was at that point last week.  Ready to leave, just hoping I’d get something back.  Instead the money I paid them two months ago to renew my site has gone much like my site and email… into the ether.

Having backups helps, it will help me, but think about your hosting what would you do on a long weekend with an advertising campaign hooked into a website that just got deleted.

- Update: 26/6/2011

Finally back up and online.  Turns out a few things took a lot longer than I thought.  I had all but 20 posts, but those missing 20, of which I had the content were a pain.  Having them as emails, meant I had to strip HTML, fix errors in the HTML etc.  Surprisingly tedious as task as well.  I did get the domain back by Thursday, but was another 24 hours for the name servers to catch up as well, so really have only had email for the last day or so.

That means two weeks downtime in total.  Yikes….  Well I have automated some more of the backups, but it was all the little tweaks to WordPress that I am still sorting out, but all seems good now.

Those last twenty posts are also broken to Google.  All the Post ID’s were out on the new posts.  Bugger, so inbound links on those 20 posts ( inc a couple of most my popular posts ) are going to be confusing to some folk.  So a few annoyances, but as I said in the orignal post, mine is just a little blog.  If this was a companies website I’d be in deep poo as it were .

So I’m off to make a backup now I have put it all back together…. have you backed up?

Tags: Annoyances // 1 Comment »

TICK TOCK TICK TOCK TICK… TICK.. TICK… TICK… oh crap…..

Yes, the ticking has got much louder.

Way way much louder.  And now that the blog is back up and running, I can update long form again.

One BIG bit of news.. the Date has been set.

TICK TICK TICK TICK….

July 7 is what we are aiming for.  That is the date that has been booked in for the C-section.  Which is less than 2 weeks away.

Mrs Wolfcat is basically full, and the Twins are doing really well, so now it is a matter of holding on two more weeks.

TICK TICK TICK….

Someone asked me if I was excited… well only if the words excited and terrified can be interchanged.

TICK TICK TICK…..

So I really should stop writing on the blog, and go and put the first of the two cots together…

Before I know it the TICK TICK TICK will the the BUZZZZZZZ as the timer runs to zero.

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Yes the blog is back….. no thanks to Distribute IT nuking the site from orbit.

but it will be next week before I get the missing 20 posts back in…

and I still need to finish tweaking the layout of the blog… at least I had most of the content backed up.. but the not the custom wordpress layout stuff, which is annoying…

the really annoying thing is that I can’t force new posts in WordPress to have a specific PostID which means that all old inbound links are now rooted…

so.. beer with me ( yes I spelt it that way on purpose…. )

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