I've changed the layout of my blog

Hi readers -

I got tired of blue, and also wanted to see if there was a New Blogger template available which would take advantage of the full width of a 1024x768 display instead of having big empty columns down each side of the page. Well, I found what I was looking for.

The new template is called "Stretch Denim" and can be applied via the "Pick New Template" in your blog's settings. I did make some changes to the html of the new template as well. The default header colour was blue, which didn't really match the light tan of the rest of the blog. So I changed the header to dark tan.

If you decide to also change your blog to a widescreen version or any other template & you use a service such as FeedBurner or MyBlogLog, just make sure you make any changes required to the html afterwards as changing the template will remove manual changes you have previously made (but it won't affect your sidebar widgets). MyBlogLog requires a small bit of code to be posted into the body so it can record visitor stats, and FeedBurner users will need to change the feed details from Blogger to FeedBurner (see my post which covers both FeedBurner & Technorati at: Technorati reading Blogger FeedBurner feeds fix).

I would love to get feedback on my changes. At the bottom of this post you should see a whole lot of links such as "Digg This!" & "Stumble It!". The last link should be [Rate]. Just click on that to vote on whether you think my changes are good or not. You're also welcome to leave a comment here.

If you are not seeing the links in your RSS reader, then you may still be using my old Blogger feed. My feeds now go through FeedBurner, so it would be appreciated if you could point your feed reader to this link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/NothingsTooSacred .

Thanks,

Sea Eagle

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Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame. -- Laurence J. Peter

Zimbabwe inflation nears 1,600%

Every time I read an article like the following one I thank my good fortune that I was born in a country as great as Australia. Life really must be hell for those living in what was once referred to as the "bread-basket of Africa".

Zimbabwe inflation nears 1,600%

Inflation in Zimbabwe has continued to spiral upwards, leaping to a record annual rate of 1,593.6% in January.

Electricity, gas and other fuels were the items that contributed most to the year-on-year inflation rate, according to the Central Statistics Office.

On a month-on-month basis inflation jumped by 45.4%, compared to the 36.3% rise seen in December.

The country has been hit by an unemployment rate of more than 80% and chronic shortages of food and fuel.

Political tensions are rising as urban workers have been hit by the soaring costs of consumer goods, public transport fares and medical fees.

Read the rest at: BBC NEWS | Business | Zimbabwe inflation nears 1,600%.

But that is not the end of it. Believe it or not, a birthday party is being planned for Robert Mugabe's birthday. The cost: 300 million Zimbabwe dollars ($1.2m):

Funds sought for Mugabe birthday

People in Zimbabwe are being asked to contribute funds towards a big birthday party for President Robert Mugabe, who turns 83 on 21 February.

The celebrations, due to be held in the central town of Gweru, will cost $1.2m (£600,000), an official said.

Zimbabwe is mired in its worst economic crisis, with annual inflation at a record 1,593% - the world's highest.

President Robert Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since the country gained independence from Britain in 1980.

The campaign to raise funds for the birthday celebrations is being run by a youth organisation called the 21 February Movement, which was founded in 1986 in honour of Mr Mugabe.

"We are looking to raise 300 million Zimbabwe dollars ($1.2m) that will be used at the birthday celebrations in Gweru," Emmanuel Fundira, chairman of the movement, told the AFP news agency.

Read the rest at: BBC NEWS | Africa | Funds sought for Mugabe birthday.

So many suffering while the tyrant lives in luxury. Unbelievable.

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A little known fact:

Q: What occurs more often in December than any other month?
A: Conception.

Flu shot alternative

I think this one might be a bit risque to put on Lockergnome's Humor forum, so I'll put it here instead. Thanks Dad for sending it to me.

Flu Shot Alternative

Miss Beatrice, the church organist, was in her eighties and had never been married.

She was admired for her sweetness and kindness to all.

One afternoon the pastor came to call on her and she showed him into her quaint sitting room.

She invited him to have a seat while she prepared tea.

As he sat facing her old Hammond Organ, the young minister noticed a cut-glass bowl sitting on top of it.

The bowl was filled with water, and in the water floated, of all things, a condom!

When she returned with tea and scones, they began to chat.

The pastor tried to stifle his curiosity about the bowl of water and its strange floater, but soon it got the better of him and he could no longer resist.

"Miss Beatrice", he said, "I wonder if you would tell me about this?" pointing to the bowl.

"Oh, yes," she replied, "Isn't it wonderful? I was walking through the Park a few months ago and I found this little package on the ground.

The directions said to place it on the organ, keep it wet and that it would prevent the spread of disease.

Do you know I haven't had the flu all winter."

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A little known fact:

There is no single word given to describe the back of the knee.

Some Moral Dilemmas

I've really enjoyed using StumbleUpon to surf the web lately. There are so many interesting sites that I have come across.

This one really got my interest. It's a list of situations where you have to make difficult moral or ethical choices. I really recommend you visit it to experience some thought-provoking situations.

Some Moral Dilemmas

The following is a list of some moral dilemmas, mostly adapted from Moral Reasoning, by Victor Grassian (Prentice Hall, 1981, 1992), with a couple additions. The question to consider with all of these is why they are dilemmas. Some, however, may not seem to be dilemmas at all.

1. The Overcrowded Lifeboat

In 1842, a ship struck an iceberg and more than 30 survivors were crowded into a lifeboat intended to hold 7. As a storm threatened, it became obvious that the lifeboat would have to be lightened if anyone were to survive. The captain reasoned that the right thing to do in this situation was to force some individuals to go over the side and drown. Such an action, he reasoned, was not unjust to those thrown overboard, for they would have drowned anyway. If he did nothing, however, he would be responsible for the deaths of those whom he could have saved. Some people opposed the captain's decision. They claimed that if nothing were done and everyone died as a result, no one would be responsible for these deaths. On the other hand, if the captain attempted to save some, he could do so only by killing others and their deaths would be his responsibility; this would be worse than doing nothing and letting all die. The captain rejected this reasoning. Since the only possibility for rescue required great efforts of rowing, the captain decided that the weakest would have to be sacrificed. In this situation it would be absurd, he thought, to decide by drawing lots who should be thrown overboard. As it turned out, after days of hard rowing, the survivors were rescued and the captain was tried for his action. If you had been on the jury, how would you have decided?

2. A Father's Agonizing Choice

You are an inmate in a concentration camp. A sadistic guard is about to hang your son who tried to escape and wants you to pull the chair from underneath him. He says that if you don't he will not only kill your son but some other innocent inmate as well. You don't have any doubt that he means what he says. What should you do?

There are lots more of these types of situations at: Some Moral Dilemmas.

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A little known fact:

At 90 degrees (F) below zero your breath will freeze in midair and fall to the ground.

Have a look at this great Vista screenshot

You may be wondering why a Linux user such as myself is promoting Vista. Just have a look underneath the screenshot to find out why I have taken this unusual action.

Click for full-size

Guess what!! This is not a screenshot of Vista. It is a screenshot of Linux:

darknoize - Screenshots - KDE-Look.org

Description:

This one is Suse 10.1 with KDE.

I had a bet, cause someone said that suse never could look like Vista. I think i won the bet

Icon theme is IcosX theme

So who says Linux is not ready for the desktop?

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A little known fact:

In the course of an average lifetime you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders. {Yuck!}

The wowsers are at it again

Has commonsense walked out the door over the past few years? It seems like every week I read some tale of a person being prosecuted for a seemingly innocuous act. Recently an obviously innocent substitute teacher was prosecuted for having porn site pop-ups on her spyware-infested computer at school (see Teacher faces prison for pop-up infested PC - Network World). In that case the PC was unprotected from spyware & malware - something the IT administrator should be responsible for.

Now we have the case where a 16 year old girl & her 17 year old boyfriend, who were in a completely legal sexual relationship, have been prosecuted for taking nude pictures of themselves. They are accused of producing child pornography. I'm sure there must be plenty of teenage girls out there who have taken nude pictures of themselves. Watch out girls - you may be classed as a lifelong sex offender if the authorities find out.

Sheesh! What a silly world we live in. Morality gone mad.

Police blotter: Teens prosecuted for racy photos

What: Teenagers taking risque photos of themselves are prosecuted for violating child pornography laws.

When: Florida state appeals court rules on January 19.

Outcome: A 2-1 majority upholds conviction on grounds the girl produced a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child.

What happened, according to court documents:
Combine unsupervised teenagers, digital cameras and e-mail, and, given sufficient time, you'll end up with risque photographs on a computer somewhere.

There's a problem with that: Technically, those images constitute child pornography. That's what 16-year-old Amber and 17-year-old Jeremy, her boyfriend, both residents of the Tallahassee, Fla., area, learned firsthand. (Court documents include only their initials, A.H. and J.G.W., so we're using these pseudonyms to make this story a little easier to read.)

On March 25, 2004, Amber and Jeremy took digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in unspecified "sexual behavior." The two sent the photos from a computer at Amber's house to Jeremy's personal e-mail address. Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.

Court records don't say exactly what happened next--perhaps the parents wanted to end the relationship and raised the alarm--but somehow Florida police learned about the photos.

Read the rest at: Police blotter: Teens prosecuted for racy photos | CNET News.com.

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A little known fact:

Adolf Hitler's mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.

Episode 6 of BOFH is out

This latest episode contains one of the funniest comments I have read in ages. I'll print it here, but it is well worth visiting the site to read the whole episode.

BOFH: The craptop

Episode 6 (extract)

"You should go to Vista."

"So you like Vista?"

"Not really, no. I run a Vista simulator."

"Virtual Server?" the Boss asks.

"Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm."

Read it all at: BOFH: The craptop | The Register.

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A little known fact:

The children's song "Ring around the Rosy" originated in medieval Europe during the time of the Black Plague. Ring around the rosy refers to dark rings that appeared on the skin of infected people. Pocket full of posies refers to the belief that if rose petals were carried in one's pocket they would not be infected. Ashes to ashes refers to the burning of the corpses. And of course, we all fall down meant that everyone infected died.

I'm a PC, I'm a Mac, I'm Linux!

I have to give credit to Mike at Kingdom of Madness for sending me this one:

Click for full-size

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A little known fact:

It is impossible to lick your elbow.

Very little doubt on climate change

One of the best things to have happened in the past few years is the release of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The number of doubters about mankind's influence on the Earth's climate seems to have dried up remarkedly.

This week I watched the first episode of Sir David Attenborough's documentary series, Planet Earth. I actually had tears in my eyes when it showed a polar bear struggling on it's stomach across rapidly melting ice floes, and then being forced to swim for many kilometres to find land. Sir David mentioned that nowadays it is common to see polar bears swimming more than 60 kilometres from the coast. The bear he showed finally made it onto land which was occupied by a colony of walruses. The starving bear tried to catch one, but got injured by the tusks. Unable to feed, that bear was certain to die.

It is anticipated that as the Arctic ice-floes continue to melt at a more rapid rate each year, many more of these magnificent creatures will die.

What a sorry state us humans have put the world in.

This article is well worth a read:

On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty

....Last week, in its first major report since 2001, the world’s most authoritative group of climate scientists issued its strongest statement yet on the relationship between global warming and human activity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the likelihood was 90 percent to 99 percent that emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, spewed from tailpipes and smokestacks, were the dominant cause of the observed warming of the last 50 years. In the panel’s parlance, this level of certainty is labeled “very likely.”

Only rarely does scientific odds-making provide a more definite answer than that, at least in this branch of science, and it describes the endpoint, so far, of a progression:

* In 1990, in its first report, the panel found evidence of global warming but said its cause could be natural as easily as human.

* In a landmark 1995 report, the panel altered its judgment, saying that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”

* In 2001, it placed the probability that human activity caused most of the warming of the previous half century at 66 percent to 90 percent — a “likely” rating.

And now it has supplied an even higher, more compelling seal of numerical certainty , which is also one measure of global warming’s risk to humanity......

Read the entire article at: On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty - New York Times.

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A little known fact:

On 15 April 1912 the SS Titanic sunk on her maiden voyage and over 1,500 people died. Fourteen years earlier a novel was published by Morgan Robertson which seemed to foretell the disaster. The book described a ship the same size as the Titanic which crashes into an iceberg on its maiden voyage on a misty April night. The name of Robertson's fictional ship was the Titan.

James Hardie $4 billion asbestos compensation deal gets approved

Well, it's been a long battle over several years (read my initial post I made about this back in 2004 at: Please help force James Hardie Industries to compensate asbestos-related cancer sufferers), but the shareholders of James Hardie Industries have finally approved a $4 billion compensation deal for former Australian employees who are suffering from asbestos-related illnesses such as Mesothelioma.

Despite the company knowing about the dangers of asbestos, it took no action to protect it's workers for 30 years, and then relocated to Amsterdam in an attempt to get out of it's obligations to those workers. But public pressure finally forced James Hardie's hand. It just goes to show how much good people-power can do.

Hardie shareholders agree to compensation deal

An extraordinary meeting of James Hardie shareholders in the Netherlands has voted to approve a landmark compensation deal for asbestos victims.

More than 99 per cent of voting shareholders approved the $4 billion deal, which paves the way for asbestos victims to access compensation over the next 40 years.

The deal is the culmination of years of negotiations between the company, unions, asbestos groups and the New South Wales Government.

It is intended to ensure current and future victims of James Hardie asbestos products are properly compensated, without impacting adversely on the company's profitability.

Read the rest at: Hardie shareholders agree to compensation deal. 07/02/2007. ABC News Online.

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A little known fact:

A 'Jiffy' is actually a unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

Today's Word of the Day: "Alleged"

I've just watched an item on our national broadcaster's (the ABC) evening news where a reporter & his crew were given some access to Guantanamo Bay. However, they were not allowed to film in most areas, and were not allowed to see David Hicks.

The thing that really hit me was the attitude of the Americans in charge there. First one said that, although Guantanamo Bay originally had a medium security section, that was no longer the case as "there are no medium security terrorists". Then another also asserted the fact that all detainees were terrorists.

Hello!!! Don't they have this word in American dictionaries?

alleged

1. to assert without proof.
2. to declare with positiveness; affirm; assert: to allege a fact.
3. to declare before a court or elsewhere, as if under oath.
4. to plead in support of; offer as a reason or excuse.

As far as I am aware, none of the detainees in Gitmo has yet been convicted. They are alleged to have committed crimes. The allegations have not yet been proved. They are not confirmed terrorists. They are alleged terrorists.

If that is the general attitude over there, then I can understand why so many are claiming that the military tribunals are kangaroo courts rigged to ensure convictions. It is a shame to see that America has regressed to the stage where people are considered guilty until proven innocent.

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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Martin Luther King, Jr

Australia: Review of anti-terror laws needed

On the 6th of February, 2007 I sent a letter to Tanya Plibersek, who is the MP for the Federal seat of Sydney. It was in regard to our harsh anti-terrorism laws & the human rights they impinge upon. I used the link at this Amnesty International page: Australia: Review of anti-terror laws needed.

The wording of my email was:

Dear Ms Plibersek,

I believe it is crucial to protect security, but not at the expense of human rights. It is the responsibility of the Australian Government to balance these two priorities in such a way that the human rights set out in international agreements - which Australia has signed up to - are upheld.

Australia's anti-terror laws introduced during the past four years go too far and have eroded our human rights.

To restore human rights in Australia, it is important to undertake an independent review of the anti-terror laws before the end of 2008 to ensure these laws uphold Australia's international human rights obligations and protect our human rights.

I implore you to take action as I feel that Australia's reputation as a freedom loving & respecting democracy has been badly tarnished by the draconian laws which have been implemented over the past few years.

Yours sincerely,

It was great to get such a quick response (only 2 days later). Read her reply here: Letter about the anti-terrorism laws.

That's one of the reasons I will be voting for the Labor Party later this year. Something must be done about the freedoms being taken away in the name of "the war against terror".

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A little known fact:

The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin in W.W.II killed the only elephant in the Berlin zoo.

Browser analysis of visitors to this blog

I just had a look at my visitor stats (provided by FeedBurner). It is interesting to see how slow the uptake of Internet Explorer 7 has been so far. Out of 39 visitors on Tuesday, Feb 7th, 20 of them were using IE. But 13 of those IE users were still using IE6. I would have expected a lot more people to have upgraded to IE7 by now.

One thing I do also find interesting is the number of visitors using Firefox. Out of the total 39 visitors, 15 (38%) were using Firefox. And, unlike IE, a much higher percentage of Firefox users have upgraded to the latest version (v2.0.0.1). Around 75% of Firefox users are using the latest version, compared to only 65% of IE users using the latest version of their browser. I'm one of the few Firefox users still using v1.5 (see why at Why I've dumped Firefox 2 for Firefox 1.5).

Here's a picture of my stats from FeedBurner:

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A little known fact:

The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language.