Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

I spent today at the High Court of Australia in Canberra. They were hearing a defamation case, which always piques my interest! It happened also to be one of the last cases that my friend, Robert Campbell, acted as barrister for, before dying prematurely. So there is a sense in wanting to see the last chapter played out, too.

The facts of the case were interesting. Mr. X had lots of money in the bank. WestX, the bank, marked his account as one not allowing funds to be drawn, only to have funds desposited. When Mr. X therefore drew 30 cheques (for which the money was there in the account), the bank marked all of them as ‘refer to drawer’, implying that the money was not there in the relevant account. This was held (by a jury) to be defamatory, but the bank won the original court case because (so the judge said), communications from the bank to the people depositing the cheques (who were told ‘refer to drawer’) are protected by Commonwealth common law qualified privileged. In other words, it’s OK for a bank to say you don’t have the cash to pay the cheque (even though you do), because they have a duty to inform the people you wrote the cheque to, as soon as possible, as to the status of their accounts, once they decide to refuse payment of that cheque.

The appellant (the side my friend was working on, and hence “our side”) argues that whilst a duty to inform payees of non-payment of funds might ordinarily arise (and if you have a duty to inform, qualified privilege would apply), it is not possible for a mistake to cause a duty to inform to arise. In other words, the bank in our case actually had a duty to pay the cheques. If it *mistakenly* believed the cheques were not payable, that did not cause a duty to inform (and thus defame). Accordingly, the defamatory statements would not be protected by qualified privilege, and the cash tills will start ringing!

To me, this defence poses a big public interest issue (which is why their honours, presumably, were interested in accepting the appeal in the first place): if every mistake of a bank were to give rise to a defamation action, the courts would be jam-packed with defamation actions. And, as a consequence, the banking system would collapse.

On the other hand, and as argued by our barrister, society has an interest in an *efficient* banking system which doesn’t rely on common law minutiae to protect it from stuff-ups in its data processing departments.

It’s a very finely balanced argument, and I reckon it’s going to come down to a 3-2 decision either way. From the questions posed by their honours, I’m pretty convinced we got two of them on-side. But I suspect it will all come down to which way the Chief Justice decides to go. There was a vague sense in which their justices seemed to want to put banking regulation on a 21st Century unambiguous footing (the fact that all precedents cited stemmed from the 1890s to the 1950s kind of gave the game away that the precedents in this area of the law are not wholly relevant or convincing. Something new is needed), so it is possible they will want to shift away from the traditional sense of ‘bank errors tend to be in the banks’ favour’. But it wasn’t obvious that this sense would carry the day.

In about six weeks, I expect we’ll know for sure. Whichever way it goes, I suspect this case will be as definitive in banking law as Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. or Donoghue v. Stevenson are in contract and negligence (tort) law… and it’s rather nice to think I was there to here the arguments for such a decisive case, especially one in which m’learned friend Campbell was involved from day one!

Two years ago, I got Wordpress.com to host the Dizwell domain, and paid for it to be accessible under that name. That payment expires on March 22nd this year… and I’m not renewing it. It means the dizwell.com site effectively ceases to be, though the domain name itself is registered until 2014. (And, for the record, the contents of the Wordpress site remain accessible -if you have the password!- under the address dizwell.wordpress.com).

Naturally, all this faffing around with domain names means changes to DNS records and consequent disruption to accessibility, but that should pass within a day or two as the DNS updates propagate around the globe.

What happens to websites that don’t, in any case, have much -or indeed anything- by way of accessible content is probably irrelevant to almost everyone. But there are email consequences, too. I’ve fiddled with the MX records for the dizwell domain so that email to hjr@dizwell.com should still get through. But that was getting pretty spam-ridden in any case, so I’m going to switch over to a diznix.com address. Mail sent to the one should get forwarded to the other, but eventually even that will get switched off. I shall be contacting those I know are not spambots in the near future to tell them the new email address details.

I get a tad nostalgic at all this: dizwell.com has been around for seven years (which counts as half a lifetime on the Interwebs, I think!), but now it is, effectively, no more. Ah well. Onwards, diznix!

I went to the doctor’s last Friday for my Swine ‘Flu jab. I generally don’t get ‘flu jabs, on the grounds that when I last did so, six years ago, I was laid prostrate for about three months, with a ghastly low-level “blah-ness” that I’d rather not repeat in a hurry. On the other hand, I’m asthmatic, so ‘flu is not good news for me. Apparently, Swine ‘Flu is related to the ‘flu that did the rounds in 1968, which means I’m probably naturally immune… but there’s no sense in faffing around with this sort of thing, if there’s a perfectly good vaccine to take the guessing out of it. So, extremely large needle in not-very-large muscle it was… and my arm aches two days later as a result. Fingers crossed that’s all that arises as a consequence!

Foolishly, I happened to mention at the time that my left foot had a bit of a callus on it. Within seconds, the doctor had her canister of liquid nitrogen out, and I am now the painful possessor of a 2cm-diameter ‘burn’ that has turned into a small egg-sized blister, making walking practically impossible. It is good to see GPs finally doing what amounts to 21st Century voodoo (because that’s all I reckon GPs have usually been capable of), but it does rather hurt!

As a bonus, I got to use the stethoscope (on the doctor’s own ample bosom, I will confess). I was always of the opinion that most of the ritual involved with stethoscopes was largely voodoo, too; but having finally heard it with my own ears, I am convinced that you could actually diagnose something significant with it. It doesn’t change my belief, however, that most doctors just wield it to impress the wishful thinking!

ToH has finally started digging my vegetable garden. It’s about time: I’ve only been moaning about the lack of one for about three years. The trouble is that nothing will grow in this place unless it is first fenced in to protect it from the wallabies, and it’s that expenditure on fencing that has been the show-stopper until now. Given the precarious state of my left foot, I spent today doing what I do best: watching someone else doing all the hard work and pointing out where they’ve missed a bit. It doesn’t make me friends with anyone, but I feel a certain sense of fulfilment!

I had occasion to go CD shopping the other day: I was after a decent recording of Handel’s Messiah, given that the one I have is (as far as things musicological go) pretty ancient, dated as it is to 1990. So I went hunting via Google, and came across this alternative. From the free samples, I thought it sounded very good indeed -and then I noticed who the conductor was: John Butt. That’s a name that goes a long way back with me! John Butt used to conduct the St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge chapel choir when I was but an humble member, tenor cantoris, way back in the early/mid 1980s. He wouldn’t, I am sure, remember me from Adam, but I certainly remember him as funny, hugely talented, inspiring and a delight to work with. He led us on our triumphal tour of West Germany (as it was in 1984), into Lugarno -and I still remember with pleasure the gasps of delight from the audience (particularly the old ladies) in Lugarno Catholic cathedral as this very English and Protestant choir started singing an unexpected rendition of Bruckner’s Ave Maria.

Having once started, I couldn’t help but poke around Google a bit more, and it turns out that good old John Butt has done rather well for himself in the intervening 25 years. Rather better, I have to say, than I seem to have managed! Yes, I have wallabies to feed and ten acres of bush to attend to. And yes, I’ve flown myself into Amsterdam’s Schipol airport. But lecturer, fellow and director of artistic endeavours I am not.

All of which rather put a dampener on proceedings, so I proceeded to Google for a couple of other people I’ve not kept in touch with but who shared those hard, wooden chapel pews with me back in the day. David Watkins used to be the principal tenor in the choir (I his mere colleague). He seems to be doing OK these days, too! I mean, he’s only played principal cellist for the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment… it’s not like he’s super-talented or anything! By this stage, I was sinking into a veritable Slough of Despond… so I checked out Ben Parry who also shared choir duties with me. I think it was who I saw him with when I clicked his ‘Contact’ link that finally persuaded me to stop the self-torture!

I’m actually happy these guys had the talent and the nous to make such a successful go of their lives -this isn’t an ‘envy’ thing, in other words. But I can’t help thinking that I’ve rather stuffed life up in comparison. The fact that none of them would have the faintest recollection of me rather makes the point, I guess! (Incidentally, the excellent series of films of David explaining the cello here remind me of just what a funny bloke he was to be around! The “outtakes” one, especially!)

Oh well, back to the hum-drum and inconsequential business of optimising a piece of SQL… whilst listening as it turns out to a very good Messiah after all (and it’s nice to be able to download FLACs).

In the beginning, Rachel begat Chandler [and Milhouse and Quincy and Theodore...]; and Chandler begat Woodrow; and one of them begat Franklin (who turned out to be more of a Franklene). And Franklin begat Jefferson. And Jefferson wasn’t very well on my birthday, as this shot shows:

You can see that there’s a lump on the left side of Jefferson’s face and his left ear is very droopy. The blighter was still tucking away the food, however, so whatever was causing these symptoms didn’t seem to be inhibiting his appetite! We couldn’t help but notice, however, how small he is:

That’s him with his mum, Franklin(e), months after he left the pouch (though he was in there an awful lot longer than any of the other joeys [of which there have been about 8 in the past three years] we’ve ever had dealings with). She’s towering over him (and eating the breadcrumbs off his coat!)

Well, we called WIRES, the Australian Wildlife Rescue Service, and they basically said it was a gum abscess, probably caused by a grass seed getting lodged in the wrong place. Their prognosis was that it would either burst and the fellow would probably then go on to make a full recovery; or it would harden into a permanent lump, in which case he might go on to make a full-ish, if somewhat disfigured, recovery; or, he might be in such pain (as the floppy ear suggested) that he would begin to starve, his mother would abandon him, and eventually he’d die. She also happened to call him, in passing, a swamp wallaby… we’d always thought they were red-necked wallabies, but looking at the various pictures of the two types on the web, we reckon the WIRES lady knows what she’s on about!

Well, the prognosis of permanent disfigurement or even more permanent death wasn’t exactly encouraging, so we wondered whether we could capture the thing, whisk him off to the vet and then put him back without anyone noticing… but the WIRES lady made it pretty clear that the minute you take one of these things out of the wild, they have to spend months being looked after by hand and can only be released back into the wild after a very long familiarisation process. So that really wasn’t an option.

Fingers crossed it was, then.

A week ago, I noticed Jefferson drooling at the mouth. It could have been rabies, I suppose, or something equally disgusting… but my guess was that his abscess had burst and he was dealing with the puss-y consequences (sorry: maybe this blog post should have started with a Parental Guidance rating!) Again, the drooling didn’t seem to be interfering with his eating too much, so that seemed a hopeful sign. And sure enough, here’s the latest shot of our little friend:

Sorry about the quality of that photo: it was taken at near-midnight! But you can see, I hope, that his ear’s now fine and perky once more, and the lump on his face is mostly gone. He remains an awful lot smaller than any joey we’ve ever seen at this stage of their life before, but he’s feisty (fights for his place at the food bowl!) and his mum still appears to be looking out for him, grooming him and making sure he’s OK… which isn’t exactly standard wallaby behaviour (at least, not what we’ve ever seen before), but maybe suggests his long-term prognosis is now OK. All a bit of a worry, therefore, and not the straightforward progression from pouch to salad-muncher we’ve seen with all his previous macropodian brethren, but reassuring nonetheless.

It is Australia Day, so a public holiday, and therefore an occasion, we felt, to hop in the car and have a bit of an away-day break in sunny Canberra. After all, there is an excellent exhibition of some stunning artwork on at the National Gallery right now. And, besides, the country’s capital city has lots of other attractions worth a visit at any time.

So that’s what we did. The ‘Masterpieces from Paris’ exhibition was indeed worth the trip: Van Goghs, Pissaros, Picassos, Seurats and more, of stunning quality -and most unlikely to be viewable in the one space again (unless you’re a Parisian, of course, in which case it’s nothing special, I guess).

The National Portrait Gallery next door is currently hosting an Australian of the Year exhibition, in which portraits of past winners are viewable en masse. That was good fun, too.

For evening dinner, we went to the Jewel of India restaurant in the Melbourne Building, right in the heart of the city. It is quite new, apparently -and quite possibly the best Indian restaurant in the known Universe. I love Indian food and would say I am something of a connoisseur in regards to working out the difference between the so-so and the better-than-adequate… but, quite simply, the Jewel of India is the best Indian food I’ve ever eaten in Australia. Their website is a little rough around the edges, but their decor was clean, smart and comfortable. Their service was friendly and efficient without ever threatening to be in your face. Their prices were reasonable. The ambience was quiet and comfortable (no ghastly Bollywood tape tracks to annoy in the background, for example). Threir prices were extremely reasonable. And their food was simply wonderful. Thoroughly recommended, in short.

Not so the hotel we stayed in. It takes something a bit special to reduce me to the sort of language I’m about to use, but Rydges Lakeside is an utter shithole and I strongly advise that no-one in their right mind should ever even think about staying there. It’s not so much the bed sheets with oil stains on them. Or the random screws sticking out from the walls. Or the air conditioning temperature control that dangles loosely on the wall. Or the crack in the wall near the bedroom. Or the bathroom tap that drips incessantly. All of those could be forgiven and overlooked, I suspect, if one were feeling slightly charitable.

But an air conditioning unit that manages, when on full blast at the lowest possible temperature setting, to puff out slightly less air than an asthmatic ant with emphysema and reduce the room temperature by not one jot in consequence is -in an Australian summer- completely unforgivable.

I write these words at 1.40 AM as a result: the room is so warm that sleep is out of the question and I’m seriously contemplating nipping down to the car and letting its air conditioning do the job instead. A kip on the back seat there would be preferable to this insufferable inferno, basically.

I haven’t, of course, formally complained: for one thing, TOH seems able to snore daintily through the worst of it and thus causing a fuss would cause me even more grief later on, back home! Besides, the English don’t complain: we just blog about it afterwards.

It nevertheless remains the case that in all my 46 years of Earthly existence and the countless hotels I’ve stayed in on both sides of the globe and either hemisphere, I’ve never had the misfortune to stay in a worse hotel. Not once, ever. So, stay away from Rydges Lakeside in Canberra is all I’ll say by way of conclusion. In the immortal words of Elizabeth Taylor at the start of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: What A Dump!

My 46th birthday present arrived today, only 4 days late: http://www.amazon.com/Cantatas-J-Bach-Librettos-German-English/dp/0199297762/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263184996&sr=1-1 Slightly oddly, Amazon was promising me a delivery on February 9th, so they’ve surpassed themselves this time.

It’s a stonkingly expensive thing, of course, especially when you remember that Aussie dollars can’t buy as much as the US ones that page is displaying; but Dürr is pretty much definitive as far as Bach cantatas are concerned, so I had to have it. Might make my translations of the texts a little better in the future, I suppose; and if anyone ever posts anything very obvious in the comments, I can always reply dismissively, ‘well, durr!’ Sorry: that’s enough awful puns for one post.

Just before Australia Day this year (AusDay is always 26th January, in case you were wondering: it commemorates the day the first European settlers finally picked the right beach instead of the nasty one they’d been stuck on for nearly a week), we’ll be visiting Canberra’s National Gallery for its allegedly-impressive ‘Masterpieces from Paris’ exhibition as something of a late birthday treat. We’ll have to hope the car is working fine, otherwise we’ll have to take the van. And I suppose that if the van goes, we’ll not have to spend so much monet on fixing the car after all… Sorry, sorry. No more dreadful puns, I promise.

Anyway, enough of all this banter… back to work!

I’ve never really been that keen on making New Year’s resolutions, largely because I am hopeless at sticking to them (much like 99% of the rest of the world’s population, I guess!) I recall, for example, a couple of years ago promising myself to lose 10kg by years’ end… and ending up 5kg heavier. So generally, I try not to set myself up for a fall these days!

Nevertheless, the temptation to stake out positions and promises at the turn of the year is a strong one; ultimately, therefore, I cannot resist making a couple, albeit largely dull, techie-ish ones!

Chrome it up

Make the switch to making Chrome my default web browser. I’ve been avoiding Chrome for a while now because it’s (a) been unstable in my experience and (b) has lacked a lot of the extensions which make my life with Firefox so productive. But neither of those factors is true any longer.

By now, we’re at version 4 of Chrome, and stability seems fine, so I don’t worry about that any longer.

Meanwhile, Chrome has long been extension-less, but if you take care to download the Development version of the browser (see http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel), then you are now able to use extensions. What’s more, most of my favourites are now available in Chrome versions: AdBlock, LastPass, Xmarks and Stumbleupon, for example.

The final thing that held me back from switching to Chrome full-time was the lack of an ‘IE Tab’ feature, such as you could use in Firefox to render the occasional (badly-designed!) site that wouldn’t display properly in anything other than some version of Internet Explorer. But even that’s now been rectified, since there’s an IE Tab extension for Chrome.

All in all, with good stability, plenty of extensions, Adblocking, synchronized bookmarks, password centralisation and the ability to render in IE, there’s no reason for me not to use Chrome full-time.

Bye-bye ‘Buntu

Become an all-Windows household. This seems like a step backwards, I realise! But we both like Windows 7 a lot, and the TV is now wired in to Windows 7’s Media Center with great results (and a happy Other Half to boot!) So it’s time to take the old laptop, which has been doing sterling Internet Sharing duties for the past five months using Ubuntu 9.04, back to its Windows roots.

Of course, that means replacing the Ubuntu box’s ability to act as a DNS server for the local network (happily, Bind9 runs on Windows and is configured in practically the same way as I described for Ubuntu back in August). It also means getting Windows to share its Internet connection …nothing that Windows’ own Internet Connection Sharing capabilities can’t handle, however. I could wish I didn’t have to reconfigure the entire network with different IP addresses as a result (ICS demands the Internet-capable PC is given a 192.168.0.1 address, so all the others have to follow), but Ubuntu demanded a 10.42.43.1 address in its time, so it’s not really that different, I guess.

Clean up Collected Cantatas

Organize my Bach cantatas properly. At the moment (and as they have been for about two years now), they’re simply labelled ‘CD1, CD2′ and so on. And if the CD contained 2 or 3 different cantatas -which, mostly, they did- then all of them are simply an unidentified part of a total CD-rip. This is no way to treat perhaps the most impressive set of 225 (ish) choral works ever written. Time to re-extract them flawlessly (thanks to dbPoweramp) and label them correctly. And once they’ve been organised, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t do what Bach did more-or-less 300 years ago: play one per Sunday (with extra Feast-days as appropriate), in a three year cycle -for the ready supply of which details, we should be grateful to Wikipedia. Indeed, I see from that page that there’s a New Year’s cantata I should be listening to today, so there’s no time to waste!

A modest list, in short -and therefore three promises to myself I am likely to be able to keep! (Not sure about the all-Windows household one, though: I give that until about April!) Anyway, here’s hoping your own lists are more compelling but just as keep-able. Have an excellent 2010 even if not, however!

I haven’t posted much lately, I realise -largely because there’s not been an awful lot to write about. (Watching Barry Humphries in concert probably doesn’t count). So if anyone out there is still reading this, have a happy Christmas and a splendid New Year.

Not a lot of people, I think, will know that yersterday marked precisely 100 years since the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air vehicle in Australia. I must confess to being slightly surprised at the anniversary myself: after all, the Wright brothers’ first flight was in 1903 and Bleriot had flown across the channel by July 1909, so it seems that the Australians were a trifle tardy coming to this particular technology! They don’t seem to have been very good at it either: the first flight ended after a mere 115 yards when the pilot (Colin Defries) grabbed his hat that had been at risk of blowing off (fancy that!). Defries lost control and the plane crashed. He had another go 9 days later, and crashed again (one hopes the hat was strapped on this time, though). His colleague repaired the plane and tried yet again in March 2010, this time in Victoria… but he managed to crash the thing, too!

Anyway, six years late and not terribly successful the first flight may have been, but it deserved celebrating, so yesterday I took the day off and descended on what is left of Victoria Park (where that first flight took place, 100 years ago to the day) to fly some paper airplanes with a couple of friends -with even less success, I have to admit, than our Defriesian predecessor:

I wish I could explain the reason why my left hand ended up like that. But I can’t, so I won’t. Meanwhile, my plane’s flying distance was something like -2.3 meters (i.e., the plane landed behind me). My old friend Rodger managed much better (something like +15 meters):

In the end, we placed our planes next to the memorial plaque and had a good laugh at our schoolboy antics for the day:

After that, it was off to the pub for a memorial beer (or two or three). So cheers to Colin Defries: perhaps the only man of whom it could be said, ‘he lost his place in history because he didn’t want to lose his hat’.

(I should note that any Melburnians about to write in and complain that in fact the first controlled, successfully-landed flight in Australia had to wait until March 1910 and Harry Houdini’s flight from Digger’s Rest, just north of Melbourne will simply be ignored. Defries got there first. Deal with it!)