Lately it’s been my misfortune to be talking to what passes for customer service from our telecommunications providers.
Interestingly both Telstra and Optus seem to have bought the same system with the same voice actress (slightly sexy, slightly reminiscent of a school teacher), although to be fair the Telstra system attempts to be less formal in a moderately creepy way.
More terrifying is the way the systems work with a call centre worker in a foreign land acting as a voice recognition machine triggering the chosen Australian voiced reponses.
(I don’t know this for sure, I’m inferring it from the operation of the system.)
It works well but I have to say it creeps the hell out of me.
A lousy, lousy week for the Liberals with the wheels falling off the careful story boarding of the first week (or have they just been taking the trash out?).
Not a great week for Labor either with no real cut-through announcements, presumably keeping their powder dry while the Liberals duke it out with the media on worms, Kyoto, and interest rates.
I’m not convinced that’s a viable strategy for winning sixteen seats (I reckon it’ll get them ten, but a close loss will see Kevin heading into retirement by this time next year as the comrades come out to take their retribution).
With neither side offering any big ideas, and both advocating an ideology of moderately benevolent fascism, all we’re left to decide between is a grab bag of twiddlings at the edges (that no-one including the Leaders and their staffs fully understands in their entirety) and who we find less annoying on the TV.
In this ideological vacuum it’s really the departmental secretaries in Canberra who are running the country, and they won’t change that much either way.
But there are four weeks to go, who knows what the future will bring?
So it’s been a few days with this most astounding of gadgets And I thought now would be a good time to relate my experiences.
Firstly, as you can see in the photograph it is both beautiful and tiny.
In that photograph it’s playing a YouTube clip of Kevin Rudd waving around an ancient laptop and calling it the way of the future. YouTube playback is one of the major features and they’ve done something sneaky to it. Rather than the blocky flash based YouTube most people experience through their web-browsers the dedicated application delivers much clearer and smoother pictures.
As an iPod the Touch is a step back from the 30GB video iPods of a couple of years ago.
For playing music the click wheel remains a class above anything else, including the Touch’s glorious poke-based on-screen interfaces.
But Apple are still selling what’s now called the “iPod Classic” with vast disk sizes to serve this market.
Where it’s at for the iPod touch is the internet connection. If you have wifi and/or frequent places that have it then what you’ve got is a very capable little web-tablet with some capacity to store your favourite pictures, music, and a couple of video clips.
Of moderate interest, Rudd’s microphones are playing, up making him even harder to listen to.
It’s funny, you know John Howard’s being sneaky when he turns side on to the camera and gets a sneaky look on his face. He’s been doing it for years and it’s a hell of a tell.
Interest rates, interest rates, interest rates… this is national vision?
Rudd is looking pale, pasty and sweaty as well, Kennedy-Nixon anyone?
And it’s over.
The best bit was when the journalists asked the questions, but even then when Howard and Rudd got angry it was hard to figure out what they were getting angry about.
Anyone else take anything home from the dreary exercise?
Do you think, perhaps, that when people watch the rugby world cup final replay at 2pm on Sunday afternoon they might have gone to some lengths to remain ignorant of the result up until that time?
If so, then perhaps it might be best not to announce the result in a promo for your news?
The tories have had a good first week of the campaign, obviously they’ve been preparing for it at least the last 18 months.
The interesting thing is how wrong-footed Labor has been through the week. One wonders if their intelligence gathering on coalition intentions hasn’t been the victim of mis-direction?
Looking forward it’s going to be fascinating to see how long the Liberal’s script holds up, and how well it adapts.
They say that no plan survives first contact with the enemy but so far the conservatives must be struggling to believe their luck.
Does the campaign matter? It does if it makes Kevin look weak and indecisive. More worrying than the tax plans is the way Labor was forced into a tax announcement confusingly shoe-horned into an education package, shoe horned into an information technology access and equity package.
Sure, all those things are connected, but at that remove what isn’t??
I suspect that when Annabel Crabb wrote in today’s Herald about Kevin’s tax policy, accusing the nation’s fathers of using their kid’s internet connections to download dirty pictures, she wasn’t expecting it to go on the front page of the paper.
The fathers of NSW probably weren’t expecting the breakfast conversations that will have ensued.
The “toolbox of the 21st century” is almost certainly not going to be an ancient thinkpad, or any laptop computer for that matter, and while there might be wires somewhere in our internet connection it’s going to matter to the end user about as much as what sort of ship the container load of ipods came in on.
It’s falling back on platitudes and motherhood statements, something Latham didn’t resort to until at least week three last time around.
The astonishing media fury is well covered by Google.
John Howard has gone so far as to describe the attacks on Don Bradman and Steve Irwin as “despicable”.
Yet from a culture wars perspective the piece was remarkably balanced, also having a (perhaps well deserved) go at John Lennon and Jeff Buckley.
Rather than being despicable I thought the piece was more desperate. Even as the tide of their fame rises the Chaser team are obviously struggling to fill the format of the show week on week.
Like a 14 year old girl writing “f*ck” in her poetry, the piece was a well aimed attempt to get attention for a fading entertainment platform.
My girlfriend was out last night and asked me to record Summer Heights High with no mention of The Chaser, she’s a pretty devoted follower of fashion.
The trouble with a piece like this on the ABC is that everyone really is entitled to a view about what goes on there.
Sure commercial TV is unlikely to air something like this, but if they did at least it would be with their own money.
The Chaser hasn’t really been at it’s best in the half hour format since Mark Latham was on the Labor backbenches (the link is correlational, not causational).
One suspects they might even be hoping to get out of their ABC contracts to use their own new found fame to do shorter pieces direct to the web.
If so they might just have found a way to do that.
Welcome to another election fashion wrap. email readers will need to click the story link to see the pictures, which all come from the ABC’s 7pm news and 7.30 Report.
John Howard was again in blue, this time a baby blue number with pale gold stripes. I thought he looked very good, but agree with the commentators about his faux-tan orange glow.
Welcome back to the election fashion wrap. Today’s pictures come from the ABC’s 7pm news and 7.30 Report. Email readers will need to click the story link to be able to view them.
John Howard wore a very nice pale blue tie (matching his porta-backdrop) with a simple suit-shirt combo. Note Gary Nairn in the background, not wanting to upstage his leader, jacketless and in a working blue shirt.
Welcome back to the Concat’s political fashion wraps. Readers may remember we used to run Question Time fashion wraps, and I have decided to revive these during the election campaign.
All the pictures in today’s wrap are courtesy of the ABC’s 7pm news. Email readers will have to click the story link to see the photos.
John Howard was in one of his classic styles: gold tie on black and white with a matching handkerchief. It’s safe and dependable, I suppose. Plus he had french cuffs and, I’m willing to bet, gold cuff links.
I’d always thought that old school Monopoly (the board game) was beyond improvement. You know the one, the one with all the London streets that forms the basis of the world’s most challenging bar crawl.
But living here on the South Coast of NSW (and covering local politics and development for a living) there was something about Tropical Tycoon that prompted me to pick it up when looking for a game to play with guests over the weekend.
I have to say I was impressed by the changes they have wrought on the game.
A DVD replaces the fiddly decks of cards and also introduces new random elements (external events like weather, cruise ship arrivals, and earthquakes) while doing a lot of the fiddlier calculations which used to embarrass younger family members not so adept at mental maths.
There’s also the introduction of roles within the game; Surfer, Artist, Police Chief, Mayor and Property Developer.
And boy, it holds nothing back, good luck explaining to the tots why the Police’s main power in the game is collecting bribes (running auctions for the bribes even) to send people to prison or not.
