James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

Having three kids, you are always going to hear some wierd and wonderful things and these past seven days have not been any different.

Yesterday I was having a "discussion" with mr 10 about his behaviour and the subject of presents at christmas time came up. He was confident that he would be recieving presents, no matter what his behaviour, when his sister miss 5 decided to pipe in with "You should listen to daddy, he went to school with Santa!".

This however was not the funniest thing we heard from our flock of kinder. A few days ago, we were leaving Wollongong Hospital after visiting Karins dad (who had a stroke last monday, while he's been laid low, it's not as bad as it could have been), and we got stuck at the lights. Karin rocked the car back and forth on the plate in an effort to hurry up the lights. Miss 3 got very cranky when we didn't immediately start driving off and said so "What are we waiting for, a stop go party? Get moving!"

Got to love kids :)

Oh god no!

'Shaye said, “our idea is to renew the worldwide audience’s appetite for the story” but he added that it is a complex novel, "this is not a script you can knock out in six months."'

I'm sorry, but epic fail right there. The first foundation book was not a "complex novel", rather a collection of short stories spanning a good couple of hundred years in the development of the Foundation from its origins in the Galactic Encyclopedia through to the beginning of it's march towards Second Empire.

Also this makes me want to avoid this like the plague that it could be:

"Shaye and Lynne's goal is to adapt the first book for now, and, if it's successful, potentially follow the New Line "Lord of the Rings" template by developing adaptations down the road of the second and third books."

I'm sitting here, it's the middle of November and I am seriously considering whether we need to put the heater on. This is nuts.

Not only but also, I'm a little concerned about the effect that the high winds are going to have on the veggies, especially the foot long zuchinni that's been growing nicely. If it survives, I'll post some photos.

I've just finished watching the second trailer for the new Star Trek movie and it's about as bad as I thought it would be.

We're not talking about going where no man has gone before anymore. We are firmly in the "re-imagining" space. God I hate that term.

I'm sorry, I must be getting old and set in my ways, but I prefer to see new things and new ideas rather than watching someone responsible for the travesty that was Cloverfield "re-imagine" Kirk, Spock, Scotty and McCoy.

Well Joxer has done it and so has cafuego, so here's mine:

First the instructions:

•  Grab the nearest book.
•  Open it to page 56.
•  Find the fifth sentence.
•  Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
•  Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

And now the result:

"He produced a length of shiny black wood from the ragged pocket."

From Terry Pratchett's "Jingo".

Occasionally we get some beautiful sunsets down here and I manage to get a couple of pics off.

Kristy Bennet has replied with her idea of a good day and I was wondering if anyone else had any thoughts. What's your idea of a good day?

You know what a good day is?

A good day is when you go out into your garden and see that you actually achieved a crop.

A good day is sending your kids off to school and pre-school happy.

A good day is fixing that pain in the arse bug that you've been trying to nail for the past two weeks.

A good day is cranking up your favourite music to 11.

A good day is realising that "hey, you do know what the hell you're talking about!"

A good day is getting into the groove.

Guess what today is

Given the fact that:

a) I've managed to hose my political blog in moving it from Drupal 5 to 6 and

b) Stephen Conroy and the Labor Party's "brilliant" (please note the quote marks) Internet filtering plan has been getting plenty of air time lately. I thought I would post a message that I sent to the Senator for Thinking of The Children several months ago.

I am writing to express my grave concerns with regards to your plans to introduce a Mandatory ISP Filtering scheme.

As I understand it, you are proposing to force every Internet user onto the so-called "clean feed". This is despite the fact that there has never been any real demand for such a service in the market (which apart from Telstra has reacted quite quickly to consumer demand for specific services).

Despite your claims to the contrary, this system is not the same as that in operation in the UK or Scandinavia (by the way the media releases were a little vague as to which Scandinavian nation you were modelling on). In the UK, the IWF focuses specifically on a very narrow remit, whereas the system you are proposing seems to cover everything from
non-violent erotica to sites that encourage people not to vote.

There is scant detail as to how and what this programme is going to be blocking. Will a 12 year girl suddenly find that she cannot access information about puberty and why her body is changing? Will searching for information on safe sex require the internet user to opt-out? How will the information about those who do opt-out be handled? Will ISP's be allowed to charge a higher rate for those who opt-out? There are many, many unanswered questions.

I would greatly urge you to reconsider your plans. At the very least making it an opt-in rather than opt-out service would allow people to make up their own minds as to whether they truly need this service.