Telstra’s future
Telstra’s group managing director for public policy, Dr Phil Burgess, arrived in Kalgoorlie-Boulder this evening for a flying visit. He came straight from the airport to a private dinner with business and community representatives at the Cornwall Hotel.
I was pleased to be among the small group of a dozen people. It’s not often you get to meet one of the most influential businessmen in the country.
Burgess is one of the “Three Amigos†who came to Australia in July 2005 with the new management team headed by Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo.
I thought the meeting was going to be off the record, so I didn’t take my notebook or camera. Bad journalist! Burgess said over drinks on his arrival that he doesn’t believe there is any such thing as “off the record” in Australia. He has heard it said, he reckons, and then read his words the next day.
Not that he’s any stranger to the media. Burgess has been the hard hitter for Telstra in its running campaign against government regulation.
I’m writing this article less than two hours after the meeting finished, and I’m paraphrasing some of the key points. Read more
New JasJam phone
I bought an i-mate JasJam on eBay for A$650. It had been used as a demo version for some purpose, but was virtually new.
I didn’t really need it, but I love gadgets and this is my Christmas and birthday present.
I’d like to install Windows Mobile 6, but I’m worried about turning it into a “brick”.
So far it works fine, except for the Tomtom GPS navigation, which I can’t seem to activate; probably something stupid that I’m not doing.
Heading towards holidays in January at least I won’t be without internet access. Between this and the wireless laptop connection I’ll be able to stay in touch.
The more I think about that the less attractive it seems.
One of the good things about a mobile Windows operating system is the easy synchronisation with Windows software. It’s a shame that I haven’t been using Outlook.
I installed Outlook on my Vista PC today and imported contacts from Gmail. I had 652 contacts! Of those, I’d say about 70 are current and of the rest there are only about 50 I want to keep. The rest were purged.
The sync with the Jasjam went well.
Mobile version of site
Using Mofuse I was able to create a mobile version of this site. You can see a link in the banner or simply go to http://mgorey.mofuse.mobi for a look.
I checked it on my phone’s browser and it is easier to scan the articles and main content.
Mofuse fetches the content via an RSS feed, begging the question why not just use a reader to visit sites on your mobile phone? I did that with my feed and the difference was that Mofuse gives a handy list of articles, whereas the reader presented the whole article and I had to scroll down to select another one.
The Dancing queen post I made in Windows Live Writer didn’t render properly in Mofuse, giving a long horizontal scroll, but looked fine reading the direct feed.
American users can invite people to enter their mobile number and receive an SMS with the link. That service is not available in Australia.
The free account enables mobile ads to be published on a 50-50 revenue sharing basis, which is the other main difference compared with a standard feed reader.
I have no logical need for any of this, of course. I can’t imagine anyone being so keen to read this site that they would feel the need to do so on a mobile phone browser. It was just interesting to check it out and see how it works.
Rapleaf reputation lookup
I came across Rapleaf tonight. It’s an online reputation lookup service. Rapleaf’s goal is “to make it more profitable to be ethical”.
The rationale: “Building a positive reputation is necessary in making the world a better place. Prove your trustworthiness wherever you go and feel confident in the identities of the people you deal with through Rapleaf.”
I registered for an account and entered my two main email addresses which I use for most web sites and online transactions.
It is possible to leave manual ratings for people’s email addresses. The Rapleaf score and percentage is found, I think, by trawling the web and social networking sites.
I thought it was linked with eBay somehow until I read: “Please note that Ebay has banned Rapleaf from its site and so there is not a way for Rapleaf members to transfer their Ebay ratings to Rapleaf.”
I can see some merit in this if you’re doing a lot of buying or selling online. People are invited to contribute towards the reputation of others by assigning ratings and leaving comments.
You can do that for me here.
One-party state
An undesirable outcome of Kevin Rudd’s election victory is that Australia has now become a one-party state. There are Labor Governments everywhere.
This isn’t transitional either. It’s hard to see any of these governments losing their next election.
The Coalition lost yesterday for several reasons including: Read more
Election comments
I won’t write an election article here tonight. I’ll do that on Sunday after work. However, I am posting occasional observations on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mgorey.
Dancing queen
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Margaret has her first dancing concert next Saturday. She has been attending dance lessons for most of this year and the concert will be the grand finale. I went along to watch the girls practice several weeks ago and it’s quite a sight. I’ve got no idea how the instructor manages to maintain the attention of 20 three-year-old girls, but she does a great job with them. It’s very much organised chaos in a cute way. There will be lots of proud mums and dads there next week with eyes only for their little princess. I wrote this post in Windows Live Writer, inserting a table with two columns, which I would have struggled doing in the WordPress dashboard. |
How do you follow the election?
Feel free to disregard this question if you’re from overseas or not interested in politics. But if you’re Australian and politically aware, how do you follow the Federal Election?
Is it TV, radio, internet, telephone, physical presence, the next day’s newspaper or some other way?
I use the internet and radio. I have several tabs open in Firefox to the AEC, ABC and whatever else is going. I tune into the ABC Radio coverage via internet for State elections, but I’ll probably use the local broadcast tomorrow night on wireless to save bandwidth.
I get seat-by-seat results on the web and listen to commentary and news on the radio. For me, internet and radio combined offer the best live coverage. Many others have their favorite TV commentators instead, whether it be Laurie Oakes or Anthony Green.
The next day I use the web and newspapers to get a wrap of what happened,
2007 election: Kalgoorlie
I’ve felt all along the Liberal Party would retain Kalgoorlie, but lose the national election, and nothing has happened to change my mind. I could be wrong on both counts, of course.
I do feel however, it will be closer in both cases than I thought a week ago. The latest Galaxy poll shows the Coalition within range of winning, especially if you consider they could take the prize with 48 percent of the two-party preferred vote.
In Kalgoorlie, people might be caught up in the tide of a national swing. I don’t really think industrial issues will be all that influential in how people vote.
The local Liberals are obviously concerned about people voting to change the government for change’s sake, because their campaigning has turned negative in the past two days. Read more
Vale Ian Smith
The world lost a significant man today. I won’t call him a great man, even though I believe him to be one, because there is too much controversy surrounding him, and in terms of greatness, he failed his mission.
Ian Smith was a war veteran who led his country of Rhodesia through what many thought were its most turbulent years.
As the architect of UDI (the unilateral declaration of independence) he gave Southern Rhodesia the sovereignty which had been its constitutional right years earlier.
Many people forget that Rhodesia could have had independence or union with South Africa, except for some intransigence and historical quirks which linked it temporarily in the 1950s with modern Zambia and Malawi instead.
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