Some things that your average travel agent and TRAVCOUR visa processing probably either don’t know, or won’t tell you. Unless you’re booking through a China specialist, but hey, more info out there can’t hurt. The few travel agents I’ve spoken to this time around were happy to admit they didn’t understand what was happening, so nothing too bad to report on that front!

1. Only tick the bare minimum. If you’re going for sightseeing, just tick that box. If you tick the relatives box you’ll have to prove they exist. You need to prove everything exists. The whole process is an existential nightmare!
2. A certain security guard at certain consulate (hint: I haven’t been outside of Sydney since February and have been told in the last month to do this, which certainly narrows it down a bit!) will not let you in without perfect documentation. He’s not Chinese (they use a private security firm at least for public areas), and not very understanding. If you’ve filled in a form before you get there, pretend you haven’t. If you need to go inside and try to talk to someone this is probably the best strategy. Call me naive, but this is preferable to faking documents using a travel agent, which was the course of action he recommended. I kid not. Let it be noted: The other security guard at the embassy is fantastic and nice and helpful… but only speaks English. Must be hellish for Hua Ren (with not-great-English) trying to get in!
3. Don’t actually fake your papers if you can avoid it. I was (again, probably naively) shocked at being essentially instructed to lie as a matter of process, and obviously this isn’t a course of action that actually should be recommended by anyone. The process is difficult enough without added complication brought about by fraud!
4. If your travel plans are uncertain, don’t worry about documenting other cities too much.
5. If you need double-entry, for example because you’re traveling to Hong Kong and back into China, be aware that you will need to document a destination back inside China. Again, the specifics of this don’t matter too much — but you are meant to produce tickets for travel along with your visa application. Specifically speaking of Hong Kong, you can circumvent this requirement by writing in the itinerary field “Destination (by train)” or similar method of transport that is very unlikely to be documented months in advance. You will need proof of accommodation at your first destination, but beyond this it doesn’t seem to much matter.
6. If you’re staying with family/friends that may complicate matters. You may or may not need booked accommodation for the duration of your stay… I didn’t test this one out!
7. Hong Kong SAR isn’t a problem at all re: accommodation or anything else if you’re an Aussie. So don’t bother with this for your visa application… it’s part of China, sure, but not for the purposes of complicated bureaucracy!
8. The actual Chinese staff at the embassy are really nice and really helpful, once you get past the trollish security guard and figure out at least roughly what paperwork you need! If in doubt, figure out a way to get inside and stand in the visa queue and ask them, and they’ll probably be able to help you with whatever question. That’s how I discovered the (by train) itinerary flexibility!

Finally, this is just my experience in one place in Australia, and will probably change. Even in 悉尼 :P

Three minutes of national mourning for earthquake victims. Taken seriously and moving in a way that is a little difficult to imagine an analogue for in Australia — tongue-in-cheek about re:cessation of Google-ing… but intended as a broader comment on national displays of stuff in all seriousness. Perhaps unfair as Australia hasn’t really had any disaster of this magnitude in recent times, I know.

Everyone was outside as traffic stopped to remember and share in the grief of millions. Some things are more important than search.

[Google post via]

Not to mention the OEM copy of XP MCE sitting in a draw that I’d lost track of (I think the system is now using a regular XP Pro license) or the miscellaneous systems that have affixed OEM licenses but for which there is no (misplaced) physical media.

Accordingly, if I want to obey the OEM sticker directive, I’ve got to download a CD ISO from a torrent site (because I don’t fork out for MSDN). But MSDN is increasingly attractive; it effectively offers the desired outcome. Unlicensed, unactivated systems that work perfectly well on a subscription basis… sure, subs suck, but whenever they stop their XP activation servers we’re all going to be screwed, anyway, so it hardly matters.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here making a list (on paper, which I’ll store with the physical media) of all the licenses in use, and roughly where. Thanks to the unauthorised rebuilding of systems that I own and have built from scratch so often (resourcefulness in anyone else’s book, evil work of a pirate to the draconian OEM overlords) whatever descriptions are attached to aforementioned systems is likely to be rendered completely untrue in eighteen months time when I once again get around to the wholesale slaughter rebuilding of them all. Intermittent reinstalls will probably happen, too, unless I’m driven so insane by the inability to discern one license from another I end up, as I do now, simply taking out the lot and shooting them all a new install.

To Microsoft: whatthehelldoyouwantmetodo? I am so not forking out the at-least-$2000 you would have me pay for retail Vista licenses for this lot–it’s that much because Vista Business retail licenses come in at a delicious $500 each. Say it with me: hell no. I’ve heard from a reliable system builder source that you’ve been telling them that the new OEM rules work in their favour as it’ll bring them more business. Sure, but it’s pretty crappy business if I don’t say so myself. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a Microsoft certified system anything, simply because it’d mean dealing with your crap in a professional capacity, and I deal with it quite enough in a professional capacity trying to do other sorts of development as my job, thankyouverymuch. I’m not going to pay a Microsoft tax twice (first for certification, second for individual licenses) just because you claim that your crappy system builders do it better than DIY-ers.

Whenever the time comes around to upgrade to Vista, if I ever deem it worthwhile on the other home desktops here not for any commercial pursuits (still running Business in response to the crippling networking capabilities of all Home line products), I’ll be making a trip to my local store, who, for what it’s worth, don’t even offer retail Vista Business for sale on their website, but mention the OEM edition an awful lot, with the token “(only sold w/ new system or to a system builder)” tacked on to placate anyone from officialdom who comes looking. I haven’t had the pleasure of breaking OEM conditions-of-sale (that’s all they are… are such things even legally enforcable in this country?!) just yet, but have no doubts there will be ample places that want to take my money when and/or if I do.

I’m actually in the position of having one spare XP license (two if you count XP MCE) at this point, but am sorely tempted to install Linux on at least one of the three systems I’m taking care of tonight just to avoid having to deal with these mediocre attempts at extortion in the future. It’s not morally defensible to refuse to acknowledge system builders as “original equipment manufacturers” when they are, in fact, conducting exactly the same tasks as their so-called ‘certified’ builders. Clearly, it’s not being pursued for retail sale: the only retail products that belong in an operating system product mix are upgrades for people who enjoy having computers that don’t work (i.e. most of the population, anyway).

It’s an indictment upon the difficulty of upgrading/reinstalling Windows that so few people take this route: quite frankly, the products don’t work. Everyone who is unqualified (in the literal, capable-of sense, not some arbitrary didacourse, paidMSsomemoney sense) to build a computer, in my experience, is unqualified to successfully install Windows independently. Even if they succeed at booting from a CD, negotiating the installer prompts (admittedly better than they used to be), manually answering questions about daylight savings and other such things that should long since have been dealt with automagically (c’mon, we’ve had GeoIP products for what, ten years now? Longer?), or at least correct from the outset (two HP machines last week were insistent the default timezone should be Singapore. They shipped in Australia. Is it so bloody hard to pick a populous east-coast state zone as the default?), chances of users correctly installing things such as drivers in post-install stages are slim to none. Nearly all phone a tech-saavy friend (I know no-one who’s ever called the Microsoft support line for OS installs… more should, but few do).

The point stands: retail licenses are for newbies, OEM licenses should be accessible to everyone who doesn’t give a crap about shiny packaging, manuals, and shooting their wallet to bits.

Here endeth the rant.

These things can be had from PayPal for about five bucks. Or $7.50 if you’re an Aussie. Verisign will flog them off to you for $30, if you’d like, but basically PayPal rocks for this kinda stuff. It’s a one-time password token that effectively enhances your authentication by a massive degree. It’s cool because it works with PayPal and eBay. It’s cooler (and worthwhile) because you can potentially use it with OpenID.

Essentially, it’s a random number seeded with a unique key that gets appended to your regular password. This defeats keyloggers and pretty much all kinds of phishing currently out there. These kinds of devices have been used in corporate VPN/dial-in scenarios for years now (predominantly, in the situations I’m aware of, with technology by RSA SecureID), but this is the first I’ve seen of it from Verisign.

And, sure, it’s only as secure as physical security or the endpoints themselves are, but it’s a massive step up from “what’s your cat’s name?” two-factor auth (though, unfortunately, I think PayPal/eBay offer that as a backup).

I’ve ordered mine and will probably be having a play with OpenID implementations of it (backed by Verisign’s PIP service, but not overly tied to it because of OpenID’s identity-delegation ability) once it arrives (10 business days).

Can’t help but wonder what Verisign’s rates for these things are in a standalone sense. Normally on 5 year contracts, but in terms of cost-per-token. Seems like a great way to defeat the idiot users who insist on having passwords that are blatantly obvious (argue all you like about strength policies: it’s often not feasible when balanced against support load for resultant forgotten passwords).

Also, to those who argue PayPal = evil, if you’re in Australia then please… don’t. Unlike in the US, here they’ve basically got the same financial reporting obligations as any bank does, and customer service necessarily to match it. All the horror stories from the ‘States (not that I think them universally untrue!) pretty much couldn’t happen here or they’d be chucked out of the country. And, whilst they’re so heavily subsidising (or at least obtaining bulk discounts for) this kinda tech, that’s cool with me.

But, you see, they were. At least fifty of them, hanging on his every indifferent word. Such is the metooism of the Internet, deserving of its proper-noun-capitalisation as one would capitalise the title of any film of the ‘my-life-is-falling-apart-and-oh-I-hope-something-interesting-would-happen-to-substantiate-sales’ variety. These days, however, not even all such films declare themselves worthy of said capitalised status. The deliciously ambivalent “definitely, maybe” sports no such accoutrements common to film, and, you know, things with names – but its name provides for fascinating displays of nothingness in all kinds of contexts, so it can perhaps be forgiven. I sat across from a workstation preparing the launch of this and other films in this country on Monday, and listened, enthralled, as the male lead declared he was thrilled to hear “definitely, maybe is releasing in Australia”. Well, that is a non-announcement, now, isn’t it? (Launching on V-day… vacuous?)

Still, when even our most influential and award-winning actors and directors lament the dearth (or, perhaps simply the death) of cinema’s golden age, we must pause to consider what is being achieved by the broad spectrum of media before us. All the trends of Internet media cannot save us from its dubious creative potential in the face of browser limitations (I have recently been working myself into a lather over the indefinite lag between multi-touch reaching the Internet compared to the rest of consumer technology — let it be noted, mobile client-side is the future?). All the films in the world cannot save us from the mediocrity of their scriptwriters, as all the blogs in the world cannot save us from trends of buzzwords and analysis and not a single real client or solved problem in sight. Neither can google (that not requiring proper-noun-capitalisation as it is used synonymously with ‘search’) save us, investing its vast resources into online platform advances. Platforms are not content. Content drives growth. Enough of that. Clooney says we should all watch TV, because that’s where the innovation is going on these days. I struggle to come to terms with that, somewhat. Part of me would (honestly) be quite content to sit and watch endless episodes of whichever series is available on DVD. DVD, because, as much as I occasionally enjoy advertising, I have absolutely no desire to see the same commercial over again fifteen times over the course of a single episode — get your bloody ads on YouTube and if they make consumers care enough, they’ll find you… nothing wrong with democratising TV advertising values, except, ironically, the potentially diminishing production values of such ads in light of the decreased expenditure on production — yeah, that’s what I thought.

The other part of me finds it’s all much the same. We all know The Simpsons is brilliant, because it pushes boundaries and made certain people in the 1990s acutely uncomfortable. Family Guy fills the void, now, only without the coherency. Its near-absurdist “we-don’t-actually-expect-you-to-get-this” irreverent take on pretty much anything is funny, but not for reasons we can comprehend. And it’s hardly going to stand the test of time. An animated analogue to The Chaser’s War on Everything, only less coherent. But let’s look at The Chaser for a moment — it is the news. Oh, wait, The Colbert Report used that line first. At any rate, The Chaser made international media before Stephen Colbert, for the audacity of — wait for it — actions beyond mere commentary.

And there we find it. The matter in which the public’s interest is held is not the simpering-yet-somehow-hostile satire, but in the violation of the sole sanctified role of government, the defence of its citizens. The noteworthiness of this act came not in the violation of this responsibility for security, but the triviality by which this breach took place. Such is the Leviathan in whom we are collectively engaged by social contract: without defence against the status hominum naturalis, bellum omnium contra omnes as Hobbes rightly presumes it, if we consider ‘nature’ after the fall.

The implication, of course, is that our government is powerless — or, at the very least, powerless to enact that which it is its duty to. C.S. Lewis expresses it thus:

“As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.” (C.S. Lewis, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”, in ESSAY COLLECTION: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories)

One might argue this is merely the impact of democratisation of governance. That, as the Leviathan power is somewhat more dynamic in its headship in this present society, it will necessarily reflect ‘leadership’ over lives in ways unprecedented in history, as the will of the individual is closer to that of the state. What pluralist absurdity: the existence of democracy itself demarks the necessity of compromise, the inability of man to, independent of the state, agree. Democracy is responsive to and guarantees the persistent disparity of the will of the individual and the State.

The role of the state, therefore, should be constrained to that of arbiter and defender alone. Anything beyond that is an unnecessary infringement of the rights of the individual. Yet our political clime is such that we assume this necessary, and, historically, this is true. We accept the mediocrity of humanity, celebrate it even. There is nothing new under the sun.

And we still trust in our ‘leaders’ for potential change. Hello, Kevin, hello, Obama. You are mere men. Your revolutions will fade. Hello, those leaders who have come before them. Your names are not remembered.

Make poverty history, cry the same people who decry government-sanctioned discrimination against the poor, the indigenous, the homosexual. Their voices are not alone. Make poverty history, cry the same people who decry government-sanctioned secularisation and interest-rate-driven threats to their comfortably prosperous ‘but-not-too-much’ upper-middle class ‘christian’ existence. Their agenda is not that of the Christ.

“A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom”, Lewis continues in that same essay. What then, do we consider? We are hungry, though not for food. We are hungry for meaning that is not forthcoming. Hungry for the righting of wrongs in our eyes; wrongs that are plain to all, but persistent because of… well, how would you finish that sentence?

Let me find your grace in the valley
Let me find your life in my death
Let me find your joy in my sorrow
Your wealth in my need
That you’re near with every breath
In the valley

There is only one meaning, one absolute reality, one Lord, one faith, and one God worth trusting because he is over all and sustains all. Without him, the meaninglessness of this earth’s seemingly-perpetual ability to decay should have us surrender to that entirely. Instead, we are to surrender to Him, or embrace that ambivalent indifference so ultimately characteristic of the endeavours of humankind.

(screenshotted for posterity if they go editing)

They say they don’t know why it sunk. I blame Vista ;-)

Update:

So perhaps SMH’s typo was mixed up. ABC (Australia) are running a story on their website wherein it’s universally called the MS Explorer. An ill-fated name for a ship, no doubt!

Perhaps Midnight Commander or Finder would be a more successful name? ;-)

I want to use it (and will) because it’s freaking awesome. The bitrate thing doesn’t massively concern me… generally speaking, I can’t tell the difference (though I will continue to rip my CDs as lossless, mostly in case I lose them). What concerns me is the potential undermining of my CD-store perusing ways as a result! I haven’t had to consider this until now because mainstream music simply hasn’t been available in a relatively open (don’t give me crap about MP3 patents, anyone can read them), DRM-free format.

It ships with artwork but that so doesn’t count.

Oh, so apparently this post was a waste of time. Of course, it’s only licensed for US sales. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me, but it didn’t. Now I’m grumpy. And irrationally craving popcorn.

Well, if you’re in the US and using iTunes… stop. This is pretty cool for you guys, meanwhile I’ll keep buying my grey-market imported CDs (which is completely legal in Australia and morally fine). All that’s standing between me and Amazon’s MP3 music is a US shipping address for invoices, presumably, so I totally could just make one up. Not breaking any law that I’m under there. But whatever, it’s all too messy.

Yeah, that’s right, record companies screwed it up again.

We’ll get there, one day…

All for some American power-behind-the-throne. If he’s going to be the key string-puller, he should at least stay invisible so we don’t need to concern ourselves with his (admittedly unwelcome) presence.

They were blocking all useful traffic (but letting private cars through? Bizarre…), and claimed to have been using sniffer dogs on the cars they were letting through. Yeah, right. I didn’t see a single dog last night. I was wearing a backpack the whole evening. OH, LOOK, THERE GOES A TERRORIST!

No-one stopped me…

Then, after having blocked off half of the northern CBD, police stop a protest from going ahead on the grounds that it’s going to cause traffic chaos. Like that was a consideration a few nights back.

And, whilst I’m on this little soapbox, what on earth is a “lawful protest” about? “Oh, here you go, protest in a nice little out –of-the-way place where no-one can see you, much less be seen by the person you’re protesting about/to. Just… stay away from the Rocks and everything’ll be okay.”

Because I’ve seen so many rabid gun-toting uni-students trying to blow up the US puppetmaster. Nevermind that Australia has far-more-sane gun-control legislation than the US does… John Howard isn’t the centre of all this rubbish when he travels to the US, even, and yet over here we’ve got to keep unarmed protestors a good couple of kilometers from their target in case they pull out… well, something.

Meanwhile, I don’t know whether I should be satisfied or frustrated that I was wearing a conspicuous black backpack all evening around various protest sites and didn’t get glanced at once.

Go home, Cheney. You’ve wasted enough of Sydney’s time and resources already.

Professional studios around the world spend millions of dollars and man-hours producing commercial entertainment. Please don’t steal their work or in ten years, it will cost $50(2) to see a movie in the theater [sic]. But, you can find lots of material on the Web that’s legal to cut, copy and remix. Look for the Creative Commons license and add to the world’s culture.

(2) Exaggerated estimate.

What. The.

It’s hard to tell whether they’re mocking the MPAA’s of the world or being serious. In which case, it’s great to see they’re being honest, but, again… what the?

Oh, and I still haven’t bought Quicktime Pro. I went there via their trailers site and saw this line in the footer: “Broken Movie icons? QuickTime 7 is now required to view Trailers– and it’s free.”

Clearly, Quicktime 7 isn’t free if you paid for 6. And, so far as I know, there’s no way to run multiple versions of Quicktime in tandem. So if you want to be able to view new generation content being created, you’re basically locked into a continual upgrade cycle. Which is a load of crap.

Also a load of crap is their Australian pricing for Quicktime Pro, which is $AU44 versus $US29 (about $AU38 at time of writing). The bits are identical. Don’t charge me more. I have foreign exchange transaction fees added to my card if I purchase something in a different currency, but it’s not anything near six dollars (try twenty cents or something ridiculously small). And it doesn’t cost you six dollars more to send an email to Australia instead of to your US customers.

I’m in this bizarre pseudo-closed-source land at the minute and I’m really fearful for the longevity of content sitting where I am now. In terms of relative openness, Apple aren’t looking too crash hot right at the minute…

But I haven’t got any education units. Or any history units. And… that has certain drawbacks.

I.Am.So.Confused.

Meanwhile, I declared war on Taiwan today on account of a particularly vermicious vehicle for volumes of veraciously vacuous vignettes. Or just regular data. But whatever, it’s a decidedly evil external hard drive enclosure with USB2 and SATA2 ports on it. SATA2 works great, USB2 worked great for all of about five minutes and then stopped working on every computer known to mankind. Where mankind = my house. Which is not quite sentient, but getting there. *drapes more blue cables, pats switch.*

This is punishment for not purchasing goods from where Josh recommends :) Nevermind that I recommended them once, I think that once, in the very distant past, I recommended Cworld and look where that got us. Okay, that fiasco was actually before content on this blog began. And I still haven’t forgiven them. I hold brand-grudges lonnnng time.

Present sweetheart supplier is Umart.net in Kingsford, because they’re nearly as cheap as MSY and within comfortable walking distance (or lightning-quick drive/bike distance). And the service isn’t too bad, either, especially when it comes to ordering stuff and getting it in same-day. Dad needed an external hard drive and bought the bits from THX (I will persist in calling them that for as long as I bloody well want to. Simply because thx.com.au is easier to type than txcomputer.com.au, and because tx.com.au was (unsurprisingly) taken — not by them. Rule number 1 in retail IT business naming: easy to recall/guess domain names. Most important IP a business like that will ever have. And, also, the name THX evokes all kinds of wonderful geeky nostalgic feelings which can’t be passed up lightly) who sold him a hard drive for $40 more than it would have cost from Umart and an enclosure for… who cares, it’s a piece of crap. Actually, so far as industrial design goes, it’s probably one of the better ones I’ve seen (if a little cramped), but the fact is it doesn’t work. So game over.

Ah, nothing like a good geeky rant to forget the troubles of the world as they pass by (IhaveanexamIwillprobablyfailonWednesdaymorningohcrap). In other moderately exciting news, apparently Raw Ideas are moving office to somewhere that there’s actually elbow room and I’m possibly going back there for some work over the summer. Depends a lot on how project stuff goes between now and the end of the year but it’s nice to have options. Would be good to be working full hours for a few weeks even if it’s split between employers. Australia needs more web monkeys (optionally imported as stowaways from China).

My money doesn’t go anywhere near as far on textbooks here as it would if we were fortunate enough to have books at the same price they are in the US. I’m trying to track down some Vygotsky works (and Fisher’s collection is categorised by emptiness, haven’t checked out UNSW yet but imagine it wouldn’t be much/any better) and don’t want to spend the earth to pursue what is, essentially, an entirely peripheral interest. So I can spend, you know, $190 on a decent text in Australia, or I can get that bundled with one other (also apparently excellent resource) for US$50 plus shipping from Amazon. It’s absolutely nuts.

One day someone will try to explain the economics behind this to me. And that day my head will implode with frustration.

“Simple name-slug personalization can lift the click-through rate by up to 30%. We’ve seen true content personalization lift response rates by 300%.”

– Rachael Heapps (RappDigital) in an interview with Direct

Obviously this is talking about email marketing campaigns (though it’s probably not a bad idea sticking the name of the person you’re writing to on personal emails, either!) and is probably quite unsurprising. With a little bit of intelligent mailing (time-of-day scheduling, etc.) it’s quite trivial to make mass emails appear to originate from a real person. In my last job we sent out over 110,000 “name-slug” customised emails each week in a little over 8 hours (~15,000 an hour) and then a little faster after some optimisations (I think it was cut down to six), so if you start it not too late in the morning it’s quite possible to get out messages over the course of the day that appear as though they have a genuine, personal, author. (The purpose, of course, being the promotion of Australia’s number one cult-of-celebrity morning show!)

Of course that was newsletter content, not the “true content personalization” [sic] that Heapps speaks of, but for the most part it’s difficult to see the appeal of “true content personalization” more broadly — businesses will generally have a core focus and if their customers are receiving emails from them it’s probably in relation to that core area. Exceptions are obviously out there… two that spring to mind are wholesalers/distributors and multidisciplinary creative agencies (web/print, event/web, print/vision, etc.) that have fairly distinct groups of clientele.

For churches, “true content personalization” could take a variety of forms but probably won’t in the kind of automated capacity Heapps suggests. For example, you could potentially have different email messages for youth/adults, parents (kids ministry)/unmarried/childless adults, men/women. However, I do think these would be different email messages and not merely “personalisations” of the same core email. Then again, if your church sent out a weekly newsletter this might be somewhat different.

The way St Matthias does things is simply to send out emails as required to relevant people. This isn’t managed terribly well at present and I’m hoping we’ll be able to change that over to a proper email campaign system sometime in the near future (when, you know, spare time rears its ugly head!) — BUT, technical aspects aside — it does mean that there is a certain freeness in the way things are run.

We can send out emails any time, not just when it’s time for a newsletter to drop around — and we don’t need to send out emails at all unless there is some reason to. That last point is pretty important, because it means that people aren’t stressing about creating a newsletter each week/fortnight/month unnecessarily. It also means that email from Matthias, in the eyes of our members and partners receiving messages, remains a vehicle eminently for the purposes of communication. In a way, this is our version of “true content personalization”: irrelevance is not expected, and, presumably, we get a better response for it (though email and web campaigns are still quite separate… by which I mean to say web campaigns are non-existent, and we can’t track email responses accordingly!)

There is, of course, a factor of size. A youthgroup with even 40 kids and six or seven leaders is probably going to struggle to write enough content for a newsletter each week — or, even if they’re not struggling, there are perhaps better ways they could have spent that time. A larger group might find it immensely helpful to keep in touch this way.

“Newsletter” is a fairly abstract term, however, and don’t hear me saying there’s no role for emails that don’t communicate anything new. They’re great for sending reminders (automatic or manually crafted) about events even where people have known about the events for ages. They’re also great for consolidating things that have already been said or done (though I personally see much less of this happening — reflection is more the realm of blogs these days than email, perhaps). Most of all, they’re great when they’re personal and relational. A cold form-mail doesn’t have the same impact as a warm or slightly jovial form-mail, and even the slightly jovial form-mail pales in comparison with a truely personal message (in composition and content).

Which raises the question as to whether this whole thing seems strangely verisimilitudinous for a reason. We strive to emulate this personal essence in mechanical utterances (oh, gosh, it’s AH all over again) and find that we can lift our response rates with “true” (there’s the verisimilitude, I guess) content personalisation.

But this is just shouting in the marketplace. If we will blame email and electronic communications for the decay of interaction in society, we must remember that it is certainly not the first one-to-many medium. The only difference I can see is that, in this marketplace, there are sometimes walls of one-way glass that prevent reply. That metaphor is interesting, because it suggests that the speaker (the observed one, speaking to the marketplace) is the one most disadvantaged by this circumstance. We have no right to reply, but they cannot even see us. They know nothing about their audience; their audience cannot steer them in the right direction.

This isn’t some Cluetrain beatup, but an observation of what is, upon a little reflection, self-evident. Essentially, if you have a message to get across to people, don’t make their job in receiving it any more difficult than it needs to be. If you have ambiguities in your message, let them ask. The tendency of organisations to use no-reply@example.org email addresses is completely contrary to reason with regards to this issue of communication. The one exception is mass media, which is, it must be said, definitely not most of us.

Via a ZDNet blog via Slashdot

See also my angry post from last week about copyright and digital media in Australia.

Even if you’re not a geek this STILL AFFECTS YOU. Own an iPod or any other MP3 player? Have iTunes on your computer?

Twenty-four weeks: legal abortion in NSW, Australia, without any need for proof of danger to mother or child.

We know the seventeen weeks figure for skin sensitivity from testing on ‘aborted’ (but still alive — and interestingly acknowledged as “living”) foetuses. Seriously. I don’t know how the experiments go exactly, but I reckon it’s something along the lines of “hey, let’s prod the unborn child and see what happens!” (semi-sarcastic tone). Sigh.

Half of this education course seems to be about the best way(s) to scar and kill children. It’s interesting in a really scary kind of way.