We got to the Cambodian border this morning and decided to spend the night in Koh Kong, although no one here can work out why we would do that on purpose.

Ping time to google.com is 1400ms. Yikes.

We're sitting in the boarding lounge waiting to go to Bangkok. There was a news report on the television with the headline Bangkok Airport Woes: Officials claim that runways must be closed to repair cracks.

Sorry mum.

I've had the growing feeling over the past little while that I don't like pundits very much. I wasn't really sure what a pundit was, but whenever someone claiming to be a pundit said something I ended up deciding they were an idiot. I looked up pundit in the dictionary today. It means "a person knowledgeable about a particular topic."

I suspect that in practice it mostly refers to a person who is very opinionated about a particular topic. I don't like pundits any more than I did before I found out what it meant.

Shaun of the Dead is the coolest zombie movie ever. So funny.

You do have to ascribe some good faith. The government uses presidential authority when they think it’s necessary and the law does not provide the specific authority they need. If there is a road that can be taken, operating according to statutes or putting people into the criminal justice system when that makes sense, they will do that.

Paul Butler, former assistant to Donald Rumsfeld

I started the latest Monte Carlo at 1pm. It finished at 7:45pm, 20 minutes before the last bus home. I'm very fortunate.

Flickr is a good example of how if you're tremendously brilliant and get in early you can compete with Google. For US$25/year Flickr must be the best value online service you'll find. It makes me wonder how Google hopes to compete, charging the same amount for less. Not only does Google give you a sad 6.5GB for photos (which isn't a whole lot), but the system is pretty shite. It looks like something a couple of talented programmers threw together in a few weeks. Flickr feels like 10 guys and years and years of perfecting.

I feel a bit sorry for Google, because they provide a lot of utility without getting a lot of money in return. But I'd be far more likely to pay a yearly fee for Gmail or Google Reader or Google Spreadsheets than I would be to pay for Google's online photo thing. Even if Flickr didn't exist. And unfortunately for Google it does.

Google should have bought Flickr instead of Picasa. Picasa on the desktop isn't even better enough than Flickr on the web. Although I do really like Picasa. I spent a while trying to work out how to connect Picasa up with Flickr, until I realised it was a waste of time.

I wonder what Google is thinking. Maybe they figured they'd just better have something in the market until they can build something good. I don't know why they bother charging for it though.

S.A.F.E Plane, originally uploaded by Nutloaf.

Absolutely brilliant. All along the answer to terrorism was so simple. Just put microphones in the toilets so you can listen for for suspicious sounds. I wonder how much they pay people for that job.

Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier

I've been very diligent about budgeting for Cambodia. After working out all my expenses and the income I'll get from Centrelink while I'm over there, I will have $6 left when I get home.

After the federal governments new welfare to work policy, virtually all the large charities said they wouldn't participate. The idea was for charities to look after people who suffered hardship as a result of the policy but the charities refused. Fortunately the Centre for Independent Studies came to the rescue with one of its trademark mediations.

For Anglicare to complain that claimants should not be forced on to charity is spectacularly to miss the point of its own existence.

Peter Saunders in The Australian

I've been using Stata's ml command for a while now. It's all quite nifty, but I couldn't figure out how to use the ml init part and I had a feeling that it would be a useful sort of command. When your likelihood function isn't globally concave there are no guarantees you're going to find the maximum you're looking for. The manual was pretty terse, and the book that explains it is $180 so I had just ignored it. But after running out of other options I started scouring the web for some example of it. And it's actually dead simple.

ml init beta:index=1 beta:_cons=0 /a=-4.566654 /b=-1.332323 /c=-0.54343

There is one equation and three parameters. All this command is saying that assume the coefficient on only regressor (mrw_index) is going to be in vicinity of 1 and the intercept in the vicinity of 0.

In this example the model failed to converge after 3 iterations with the hints and failed after 13 iterations without the hints. And that seems like a great improvement.

Flock is good.

I was on my way to work this morning and the 370 was chuffing down King St. It whizzed past a guy waiting at a bus stop who got a bit upset when the bus didn't stop for him. He yelled at the bus driver, loud enough for several blocks to hear him, "Eh fuckhead!" The bus stopped in the middle of the road, opened its doors and the fellow ran up to us. As he jumped on, a little bashful, he said, "Cheers mate."

I am apparently last.fm's biggest fan of Coleman and Bartle. Rockin'.

Cambodia Gear, originally uploaded by Nutloaf.

I've been having a competition with myself this trip around to see how small I could make me backpack. I found Onebag.com and it has a really good minimalist sort of travel gear list.

So I'm going to take this and see if I die or get anotherwise annoyed by its size. I'll let everyone know if it works.

A lot of the credit for the smallness has to go to my delightful little sleeping bag which weighs 800gms. Lovely.

Cancer patients are being urged to avoid soy food products due to fears they can cause tumours to grow faster.

Cancer patients warned to avoid soy products - National - smh.com.au

I don't really know what to make of this. They don't actually quote the research. And a few months ago I had a look at the research on soy foods and cancer and couldn't find any evidence.

They're probably only talking about weirdo vegetarians like our house who have tofu and soy milk every day.

We were off to see Apocalypto at "The Broadway" last night. I thought it was brilliant, although I may have been one of the few in the cinema. When people tell you it's violent it would be unfair to say they are lying, but I don't feel like it detracts from the film. I get the feeling that for a lot of people their enjoyment equation goes a bit like this:

nasty sex/drugs/violence + great movie = slightly less great movie

I reckon we hope that directors will have a natural prejudice against nasty sorts of things because they make us uncomfortable. I didn't think the sex in Shortbus detracted from it at all. To me, making a movie that talked a lot about sex and actually had sex in it was a brave sort of thing to do. Talking about sex is easy. Clerks II talked a lot about it, and didn't have any. It was a good film, but it feels kind of fake. It feels like a film rather than a story. Films are concerned with the viewers response but stories are not. If the purpose of telling a story is to change things then perhaps a story should be more practical. But I don't think the purpose of stories always is to change things. If I was tortured in prison for 10 years I'd want the story of what happened told, not the story that would affect the most people.

I reckon that Mel Gibson is amazingly effective at giving some dimension to concepts that we talk about quite a lot but don't understand. People who saw his last film have a much better idea of what the rest of history understood crucifixion to be. And people who saw this film have a much better understanding of what ritual sacrifice means. Maybe our fresh understanding is simply that these things really suck arse. There are probably people who already understand these things pretty well, but I'm not one of them.

I also question whether it is possible to get desensitised to confronting violence. If we did then that might be a strong argument for having less of it. Although even if it was true I think art's best chance of changing the world and honouring its stories is by reflecting reality. If a film about an actual war desensitises people to violence, it's hard to blame the film. But I'm actually not sure that it does desensitise in the sense of caring or feeling less in the long-term. It can certainly make us feel numb, but I suspect that's closer to shell-shock than ambivalence. People who've experienced far worse violence in their lives than me watching a violent film have managed to maintain a sensitivity and distaste for violence.

Until I'd read All Quiet on the Western Front I'd been able to say that there are worse things in the world than war. For me, that had been the chink in the nonviolence philosophy. All I have left now is the idea that violence can sometimes create peace, but this is a far more fragile belief. On the balance, I would say that over the past few years my exposure to violence has dramatically sensitised me to it. And that is mostly thanks to the films and books that talk about the nasty parts, and definitely not the ones that glorify the fun side of violence and gloss over the nasty parts.

Firebug rocks. It solves every remaining HTML/CSS development annoyance at once.

Apple's new iPhone is beautiful. As with most of Apple's stuff they've done everything you can really imagine to make it productive. Although what amazes me most isn't the phone, but why no one has done all this stuff before. None of it is difficult or particularly brilliant. It feels like the inevitable outcome of sticking a few smart people in a room for a couple of months. It's almost like every other company in the world is frightened of coming up with something new. Like anything that hasn't been done before is dangerous. The industry leaves these gaping functionality holes in their products so that Apple can waltz in and blow them all away with almost no effort at all. I suppose Apple have the size to make risky investments feasible, but virtually all of them pay off. You'd would think that others might have cottoned on by now.

It's a very nice phone though. I'd buy one. And after getting my new Nokia 1110 I'm pretty hard to impress.

An Iraqi child offers a toy to some British soldiers in Basra (Sydney Morning Herald)

We dug a giant hole in the sand yesterday. It took six of us about two hours. My arms and legs are pretty sore today.

I spent a reasonable swathe of the weekend at Andrew's birthday party, although I'm not sure how old he became. It was at his dad's house in Umina, which is very fancy. We had a good amount of fun. There was always enough food to scrounge for. We had quite a few swims. On Saturday night we went for a midnight swim and saw some amazing phosphorescence. Whenever you moved you'd leave a trail of super-bright shining particles. I found out that they were called dinoflagellates and they light up when something disturbs them. When a something attacks them the light they create attracts predators of the attacker, because other fish have worked out than when they see light they'll find smaller fish feeding on these dinoflagellates. Which is pretty damn cool.

We also dug a hole. But it filled up with sea water. And then some little kids came and jumped in it while we were having lunch and pretty much ruined it. Kids have no appreciation for art and shit.

The band that Andrew was friends with and who came to the party were tops fun. They sung politically incorrect songs out into the innocent suburban evening until well late. Thank goodness for the diminished expectations everyone has of their neighbours on Saturday nights.

Overall it was fun. I would do it again for sure.

There can be no power without cruelty. If power forgives, it prepares its own destruction, because none will fear it when they see that it uses love and not the force before which one trembles.

Petr Chelčický

I went round to Libby, Alice and Laurence's house last night for their sci-fi night. Unfortunately we couldn't get the sci-fi to work so we rented some movies. While the other's watched Kenny I watched Clerks II on my own. It was very funny. It had all the signature Kevin Smith lameness which always manages to amuse me immensely. It's nearly all the same people who did the first Clerks and they're a bunch of freaks. This was a "Hollywood" movie so everything was shot nicely and it comes in this over-produced DVD with painfully daggy plot synopses and 4 hours of special features. But I'm so glad Hollywood encourages these sorts of people.

I started watching the director's commentary as well. It's the funniest commentary ever. They just spent the whole time insulting each other and the actors who weren't there.

I don't know many people who wouldn't be disgusted, but I thought it was great.

Dad, Wayne, Neil, Simon and I went down Danae Brook Canyon on Monday 18th December. It was probably the toughest day of my life. I probably should have trained up a bit for it. Maybe 25 is the age where you really have to start doing that stuff.

We had to start at 6am (though we didn't start walking til 6:30am), so we were up at 5am. We camped the night at a sweet little spot that Wayne had found.

Finding the canyon was pretty easy. A cairn marked the point to leave the 4WD track and there was a track of sorts that was fairly easy to follow. We got to the first abseil at about 8:30am.

The first abseil was easy. Good anchor point. Quite long but you could probably climb down without a rope if you needed to. We were all pretty nervous so it was good to have something like that to start off with.

I was using a double-piton bar and we had a 9mm rope. Not a good combination. Only the longer free-fall drops my hand wasn't strong enough to control the descent. I did it for the first two abseils but my hand started to cramp so I shared dad's rack from that point on. Neil and Simon had figure-eights but I think the racks are the best.

The second abseil was long but straight forward too. Couple of slippery parts but nothing to tricky.

The third abseil was a bit tricky. Having stolen dad's rack I went down first. The book tells everyone but the last person to abseil on the outside of a large chockstone about half way down the drop. Getting onto (and over) the chockstone is tricky and there is the possibility that the rope will jam. If it jammed it would make it hard for the next people to come down. And the last person would have to unjam it and go down the inside anyway. So I decided to go down the inside of the chockstone. Unfortunately the rope went on the outside and I got jammed. I spent a fairly hairy 10 minutes hanging 15 metres above the ground trying to unjam the rope so I could keep going down. I was a couple of metres below the chockstone and didn't have prussick loops so I couldn't climb back onto the chockstone to unjam the rope. The other guys couldn't see me but I yelled out for them to set up the backup rope. Eventually - just as Wayne was coming down the next rope - I was able to flick one of the strands out of the crevice. I used it to pull the other strand out of the jam. I'd tied off my belay device so I was secured and that had freaked me out a bit. But untying it was worse. I was worried after I'd undone the knots I'd be left holding onto the wrong piece of rope. Luckily I was able to wedge myself against by walls of the tunnel I was in so I didn't have weight on the rope anyway. After that it was all good. We all came down pretty easily.

We had a bit of a scare when the rope jammed while we were pulling it down. But we all jumped on it at the same time and it came tumbling down with us.

The fourth abseil was a winner. Free fall through the middle of a waterfall for 30 metres.

There were a few more abseils which we were expecting to be tricky. But none of them were particularly tricky. In fact they were some of the easier abseils I've done, apart from the height. Which was high.

There was, however, an extremely tricky walk once we'd finished the abseils. We had to clamber down through some recent-looking rock-falls for about an hour, and it was hard work. The first part of it was pretty dangerous too. Much more dangerous than any of the abseils we'd had to do. Then there was a nice stroll for another hour through the river-bed. Although by that point we were starting to worry about light, and our legs were starting to die, so it wasn't as pleasant as it might have been.

It was only when we got to the bottom of the creek that the hard work really started. We had two hours of light and a surly 600m slope to climb. Normally 600m wouldn't fuss me that much, but we were already knackered and we had to carry water up in case we had to camp the night on the track. So it was an extremely tough hour and a half up this hill. Our legs started to cramp up. My achilles started to hurt. For the second time in 15 years I started to feeling asthma coming on.

I think it was the asthma that really got to me actually. I remembered my last (and only serious) attack at the beginning of the year on a walk with Libby. That walk was a total cruise the attack left me lying in the middle of the track for an hour or so until I recovered. We didn't really have the luxury of stopping on Danae and I was freaking out that I'd spend the night sleeping where I dropped.

Eventually, and it seemed rather magically, we arrived at the top and popped out onto the main walking track without a fuss. From there on we simply had to stuff our faces with nuts and jelly beans and chocolate to make ourselves keep walking. Leg cramps made certain movements almost in possible, so much of my rock-climbing was really creative falling mixed in with some odd sorts of levering.

When we got to the end we were pretty tired. It was 9:30pm, about 30 minutes after dark. The day had been about 15 hours of fairly solid activity. We went back to the camp site and had a beer. I'd been craving it all day, but I was too tired and hungry to really enjoy it. We were too tired to cook anything, and we knew all the restaurants were closed. So we ate whatever chips and biscuits we could find left over. It didn't really help.

It was still a long drive home, which I only drove a tiny portion of. We ended up getting into bed at about 2pm. Youngy had to drive back to the Central Coast, poor bugger. It was a long day. And a good sleep.

For the next three months I'm going to avoid computer games, DVDs, cinemas and alcohol except on Friday nights. I want to see what happens.

I went to see Happy Feet with Ma yesterday. I took her out for the day as a Christmas present, which I can't help but feel is a bit lame. I see her often enough anyway without needing an excuse. But we went to see it at Castle Towers, which was a painful ordeal. Cheap-arse Tuesday at the cinemas, school holidays, an enormous shopping centre and a 92-year-old grandmother are not a good mix. We missed the session we'd been aiming for, so we had lunch while we waited for the next one.

I was really excited about going to see it, because I like penguins and I like animations. I had thought Ma would like it, but just before it started she told me about how she'd seen some film about a fish called Nemo last week and had thought it was stupid. I'd loved Finding Nemo, so that worried me.

Fortunately, although I liked Happy Feet rather a lot less than Finding Nemo, Ma seemed to like it more. I was hoping for big musical dancing numbers and funny jokes and a cool story. But all it really had was cute animation. The plot felt like an after-thought, none of the music was original, and it wasn't really very funny. But it was very, very cute indeed. And possibly worth seeing just for that.

Jem and I watched The Banquet last night. It was beautiful. I think that those Chinese folk must be making thousands of films, but only releasing the absolute best. They make Western film-makers look like complete amateurs.

The Banquet was basically about power and to some extent Chinese politics. But it also had a lot of good fighting, which I think made me like it more and Jem like it less.

I've installed Wordpress MU on my happy little server. So if any of those footboot.net folks languishing on Movable Type want to move their blogs you should let me know. If you want some theme it's easy to throw it in there too. There are heaps of good themes for Wordpress.