Citing stopping childhood obesity as their motivation The Greens party have introduced a bill calling for the banning of junk food ads during childrens television shows.  Read more here.

I've been a supporter of the Greens for quite a long time now and its always good to hear them in the news.  I don't think there should be any ads during childrens television but I'm sure a lot of toy manufacturers would disagree with me.  Anything that stops kids being manipulated before they have the skills to better interpret the impulse's advertisements target is good to me.

I've been playing Immortal Cities:Nile Online lately and its a fun little empire building game.  Take control of your own little section of the Nile and get your little slaves farming wheat and digging out clay to build edifices to your eternal glory.

Look for Set Jnr in Rafeka if you play and we'll trade.

How will you take over the world?

Find out at http://www.darksites.com/evilplan.php

muhahahaha

Evil Plan (tm)!

 

Your objective is simple: World Domination.

 

Your motive is a little bit more complex: Power

 

Stage One

To begin your plan, you must first seduce a wealthy heiress. This will cause the world to swallow nervously, overwhelmed by your arrival. Who is this spammer? Where did they come from? And why do they look so good in a corporate suit?

 

Stage Two

Next, you must seize control of the internet. This will all be done from a corporate tower, a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory. Upon seeing this, the world will give up, as countless hordes of mad scientists hasten to do your every bidding.

 

Stage Three

Finally, you must let loose your needlessly big weather machine, bringing about something that's really metal. Your name shall become synonymous with metal, and no man will ever again dare steal your woman. Everyone will bow before your dashing good looks, and the world will have no choice but to give you control of the planet.

Trying (rather painfully) to customise the journal a little.  Grabbed some shots of THE BESTEST GAME EVER to make a background.

Learned that I don't think I like livejournal too much when it comes to making your blog your own, gotta pay money to really customise which is probably a good idea anyways as it gets rid of the annoying ads.

Anyway let me know if it is an utter eyesore of if its acceptable

Well the conference turned out generally to be pretty interesting.  It finished with free booze and a pretty good dinner which is always nice.  They had a photographer there that would impose the picture onto a Grazia magazine cover (They where one of the sponsors) as you can see below.  The comedian Anh Do was MC of the conference and he was quite cool too.  Now I gotta sell enough magazines to pay for it :/
                                                    

Waiting at the airport at the moment while our stupid plane is delayed by fog.  Going to my first ever work conference, yay?

Well i've been a bit slack but I have finally uploaded the first lot of photo's to my scrapbook for people to look at.

See my Wedding gallery here

I will be adding more but there are enough in there to cover the night.


                                           

So I have promised to keep everyone up to date with the wedding and the honeymoon.  I was sure I checked that the place we are staying at had internet available.  I guess I should have checked a little deeper, its fixed point access in a little computer room, not the wireless I had though so I kinda lugged my laptop to Hobart for no reason.  The connection is pretty slow too so I'm gonna wait till I get back to upload a heap of pictures.

We are really having a great time though.  Highlights include
-Seeing Port Arthur and doing the Ghost Tour
-Seeing lots of Tassie Devils
-Visiting the King Solomon Caves
-Getting snowed on at Cradle Mountain

Going to Mt Field National Park today then hoping to get time to drive up Mount Wellington then have dinner at Wrest Point hotel with the casino.

It's weird the things people assume.  An email at work today the author made the assumption we are a family business, informing me how this person had spoken to my wife etc.  It feels too petty to take the time to inform him that the person he spoke to isn't anyone's wife here, yet it feels odd to leave the misconception hanging.  This isn't the first time this has happened, and on other times people have assumed that my boss here is also my father.  Are these just those odd little moments that there aren't any right way to handle to am I just weird for caring?

My boss got a sms the other day from Telstra that was:

 "Int'l Roaming/DirectDial to be activated on Telstra Bus mobiles 24/6/08.  Fees apply 4 use.  See telstra.com 4 info.  To deactivate email roaming@team.telstra.com"

First off its teeth achingly awful for a huge company like Telstra to be abbreviating unnecessarily and substituting 4 for 'for', especially in a service message to its customers.  Please, it doesn't make you hip with the kids, it just hurts.

Second, what an irresponsible way to communicate possibly bill affecting information to your customers.  No details especially on costs and a irritate the customer opt-out scheme.

I was asked to investigate this for my boss.  I went to the Telstra site.  Considering this sms must have went to all business customers directing them to the website on this issue it was surprising there was no front page article or information about this change of services.  Poor planning there.  So I do a site search.  DirectDial gets 0 results.  Roaming gets some results but I still got a heap of marketing crap to go through to finally find out there are no charges for the service unless you actually use it.  I hope this is current and true, I'm going to look bad at work if the next bill has extra charges on there.

Wired magazine have a feature article this month titled Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green

There is a fair bit to digest in there and I only have had a chance skim it so far but wanted to share it. It seems to get the point and miss the point all at the same time.

Downloaded the trial for the Spore creature creator yesterday. My creations so far, including the ultimate paper deliverer MK1

Yet another front page article in today's Advertiser about city drinking.  Apparantly a 3am 'lockout' system that stops people entering licensed venues in the city will greatly reduce alcohol related crime, in the city.  A similar project in Melbourne has supopsedly reduced such crime by a staggering 20%.  The article doesn't tell us how much such crime rose in surburban areas without the lockout system though.  Similarly opposition to a non-voluntary lockout scheme in Adelaide claim it will drive many people to surburban hotels, where there is far less police presence.

I can sympathise with the police, it's surely draining to know every weekend the sort of drunken idiots you're going to have to deal with.  Comments like "Many young people....are consuming far too much alcohol for their own good and for the good of society" (emphasis added) do make you seem like a rather pompous idiot though.

My initial thoughts are being stuck in a stuffy club and knowing if I leave I can't drink for the rest of the night is going to make me drink more, not less.  All that time walking between clubs and getting bites to eat and whatever is less time spent drinking.  Also being stuck in a club with someone who for whatever reason may want to cause trouble with me, would lead to more violence as I just can't go somewhere else?

Everyone that goes to clubs are adults, at least they should be.  Why not respect their right to freedom of movement and to make their own decisions.  We are still supposedly in a free society right?  Free even to get sh*t-faced drunk as long as we don't break any crimes.  Why don't we look at why some people when drunk apparantly get violent or cause other crimes rather than simply trying to restrict everyone to a service most people still use legally and without problem.

So I'm flipping through a magazine at work (yes it was Ralph Magazine) and I see an 'ad' letting people know about the level of recycling in the print media Industry.  To paraphrase 76% of print media gets recycled up from only 28% 16 years ago.  It was a surprise to see a message like this inside a magazine, but a good one. 

I'm always mindful of how wasteful my industry is, from all the paper printed daily for throw away news to the plastic we use in home deliveries and the paper in the office.  I always knew our paper returns where recycled, we take them straight to Visy Recycling at the moment for News Ltd.  Still to see that there is a dedicated body the Publishers National Environment Bureau to organise the industry makes me feel a bit better.  Its probably as much a marketing tool as it is a genuine initiative but still if it gets good results then it is helpful.

For as long as I have been in the Newsagency business I should have known these sorts of details a long time ago but oh well, Life is all about learning.

We are supposedly in a binge drinking epidemic and The Advertiser, as they so often do when they think they have found a popular item to soapbox, are not letting us forget it.  After last weeks awful 'expose' on the 'reality' of binge drinking in Adelaide (did this really enlighten anyone? at all?) in The Sunday Mail we are again treated to more articles on the matter this week. 

Mike Rann has aparrantly described binge drinking  as a pandemic that should concern every parent.  E-V-E-R-Y P-A-R-E-N-T.  There are more pictures of trashy teens vomiting and an editorial bemoaning the cost of all these selfish drinkers on our health system.  In the context of the current doctor and emergency room crisis we also get a nurse telling us how just how wasteful all these self-abusers are.  Because you know, we don't pay our doctors enough but HOW DARE the kids waste what little resources we do allocate.  In case you where worried though, none of these people are wowsers, so feel assured these are balanced observations.  Oh yeah, the churches are telling us these kids are wasting their lives.  Don't forget to mention yet again, the burden on the taxpayers.

Seriously I don't care what statistics people may pull out of whatever.  We aren't in an binge drinking epidemic.  The trashy antics have been going on for some time actually.  I was somewhat trashy when I was younger.  I believe I have even vomited on Hindley Street.  My PARENTS where somewhat trashy when they where younger.  I will have to check up on whether they have ever had any public spewings, I don't doubt it happened though.  People 1500 years ago where somewhat trashy when they where younger.  Yes alcohol was involved.

So the Labour party gets a nice extra boost from increased tax on alcopops in the guise of curbing binge drinking, and now everyone trying to cash in this political currency, and yes, the wowsers, are jumping on the bandwagon.  Should we have more education on the harmful affects of alcohol and demonstrate responsible use?  Yes.  Should we be talking about a range of measures designed purely to limit and punish young people for doing WHAT WE ALL DID when we where younger, and having the affrontery to push their classlessness in our faces?  HELL NO. 

It never works to tell younger generations to simply learn from our experiences and not risk anything themselves.  If we fail to provide safe monitored locations like the city centre and local pubs for young people to test their limits and indulge themselves, then like everything else we prohibit we will just push it out of sight.  We get less sick people on the side of Hindley Street yes, and more Corey's trashing homes and breaking other laws.

I'm a parent, and I'm not concerned.  When my kids get older I will be answering all questions they have, giving them monitored exposure to alcohol and trying to pass on all the wisdom I have gathered.  I will then be trusting them to make their own decisions.  Should they end up in hospital for alcohol poisoning they will get a little sympathy, a bit of, 'well now you know' but certainly no gasp of suprise as I forget what its like to be young and judge my children differently than how I judged myself in those years.

For once, how about all these people that ask us to 'think about the children' actually do so, in a respectful and mature way.

In the Advertiser today there is an article on food additives in childrens food and the effects they are having.  I point this one out because healthy food is something I have been looking into recently and its pretty scary just how bad it looks like most food is.  It was hearing about excitotoxins on newsreal that got me looking up what it is, and then I watched this video.  So I'm not some food saint now but we have made some changes at home.  We bake our own muffins and cookies as snacks for the kids, read the ingredients list and use a book Kelly bought called The Chemical Maze to help work out what is ok and not.  The idea is to get the garden growing and make our own food, pretty basic common sense really.    It would be nice to be able to trust what was being legally sold in our supermarkets though.

Welcome to my blog. As can be guessed from my name I work in a Newsagency. Being a Newsagent I get exposed to a lot of media and with what little time I get can skim articles from many newspapers and magazines. This blog will be my chance to discuss what I read with others, and what goes on in our industry.

Its a bit of a surprise to me that someone thats spends as much free time online as I do has not participated yet in the 'blogosphere,' either reading or writing. Its time to dip my toe.  Learning how to manage this site and improve it will also help my overall web knowledge as well.

Besides reading lots of print media I also spend a fair bit of my free time playing online games and general browsing (especially web-comics).  Expect the odd crazy Youtube link too :)