Archive for July, 2010

Technology – Which Way Is It Moving Us?

written on July 29th, 2010 with 1 comment

There’s no doubt that technology has advanced at an extraordinary rate over the past 20 years, but you really have to wonder if it is stunting our growth in some areas and causing us additional stress that just didn’t exist before the technological boom.

One of the most obvious side effects of technology is the increased desire for everything to be instant. You can buy just about anything online and some products such as music and video are delivered instantly. We can pay our bills, transfer money and book tickets to a theatre production all with a few mouse clicks.

Our expectations for support, particularly technical support, are much higher than they used to be. If the person providing a service is online then we expect them to be available 24/7/365. As a programmer I know that many of my customers expect to be able to contact me any evening, public holiday or weekend and there’s no such thing as penalty rates for online service providers, programmers or web developers.

Our kids spend more time online than they do with their ‘offline’ friends. I remember when I was young I used to walk to my friends houses to see if they wanted to hang around, play some cricket or baseball or watch some TV. Nowadays just about everyone is just an SMS away. It would be interesting to compare the average distance a child would walk each week thirty years ago compared to today. It’s no wonder that obesity has become such a major problem for some kids.

Of course there is also the other side of technology. With the information that is available on the Internet, most of us can access more information in a couple of days than most people would have had available in a lifetime 40 or 50 years ago. For businesses it is much cheaper to use email or SMS than it ever was to use the landline – particularly for interstate and international calls.

It’s definitely food for thought though – the cost savings and efficiency improvements verses the stress, health and anti social aspects of technology.

My Little Experiment

written on July 15th, 2010 with no comments

So, here’s the deal. My ambitions include public speaking (about personal development) and making a living just by being one of the online ‘good guys’. I’m not talking about the good guys that give with one hand and take with the other – I’m talking about building something here that is really useful to a lot of people.

I’m 47 and I have a mess of life experiences and a whole lot of technical and programming ‘head stuff’ to share. Up until now I’ve been putting blogs up with the primary intention of making money from them. Big mistake. I’m not saying that it isn’t possible to make money from ‘niche’ blogs – what I am saying is that it just isn’t ‘me’. I enjoy doing things that have a lot more purpose than just making money.

Crikey – what legacy would you rather leave? Would you want people saying ‘oh yeah, he made a s@*t load of money’ or ‘he really made a difference – we’re going to miss him’. I know what I’d rather and as the years go by and the clock keeps ticking I figure I better hurry up and do something useful!

So… I’m going to experiment on this blog with the Thesis theme. It seems that it has way more options than anything else out there, but there’s a learning curve. Specifically you need to be fairly good with CSS. It’s never been a strong point, though I’ve been using CSS quite a bit over the past year, so I guess now is as good a time as any to start learning.

So if you happen to drop by and the whole blog is upside down… fear not! It’s just me ‘sperimentin’ :)

Internet Filtering In Australia – A Necessary Evil?

written on July 8th, 2010 with no comments

I’ll be honest – I have been totally opposed to any form of Internet filtering. When Stephen Conroy announced new plans to filter the Internet in Australia I immediately thought that perhaps he was following in the foot steps of our best known luddite – Richard Alston. Alston came up with some of the most hilarious ideas and suggestions during his term as minister for communications, including his statement that the only thing the Internet was used for was porn.

Anyway – getting back to Conroy…. we all know that it just isn’t possible to ‘filter’ the internet. There are always proxies and other ways of getting around access restrictions. You have to ask yourself though – what is the filtering really about? If it is about preventing adults from deciding what is good for them and what is not then I can see the anti-censorship argument. On the other hand, if it is about removing the potential ‘customers’ of people who provide illegal material then is that such a bad thing?

There’s no question that it’s incredibly controversial but if you are opposed to this filtering policy then first ask yourself… why?

Are you a pedophile who is going to lose access to the abhorrent sites that peddle child pornography?

Do you believe all the trumped up suggestions that it’s ‘going to slow the whole internet down’? Don’t forget that our NBN will increase speed by around 100 times, so any slight delay caused by a content filter will make no difference. The delays or ‘slowness’ they talk about are in terms of milliseconds so don’t be fooled that it’s something you will actually notice.

Are you a ‘free speech’ supporter who believes that any censorship is a bad thing. If that’s the case, does that mean that you support the supply and distribution of child pornography and other obscene content? You can’t have it both ways!

At the end of the day, I think the success or failure of filtering will rest on how smart the government is when they implement it. if they have an adequately staffed department that is able to react swiftly to reports of false positives and other mistakenly filtered material then I’m sure the majority of the public will accept that it is a necessary evil. I guess we will just have to wait and see…