A few cool quotes I’ve noticed in the news over the last week:

We want peace!

– the protestors who proceeded to throw themselves at the PM’s car yesterday. I’m plenty amused to see Johnny delayed and his little flag broken off, but what on earth were those kids thinking, claiming on the TV news to have been ‘provoked’? Sheesh.

… and she said, “The Israelis need a government that will stop being so aggressive, and we need a government who stops spending money on guns and starts building schools and hospitals so Palestine can be like a proper country.” She stared at me hard and said, “By the way, who did your hair?” and I said, “The Israelis,” and she said, “See what they do?”

– The inimitable Danny Katz, in the Age last week.

Doesn’t matter if the water is safe, it’s coming from [the] toilet, and people don’t want that.

– An early voter rejecting the only sensible long-term option for water use in a referendum in Toowoomba yesterday.

Overseas is one thing, but Melbourne, for God’s sake?

– Greg Craven, one of Curtin’s politics dudes, pointing out in yesterday’s West how horribly bad Perth is at holding on to its smart young people.

Firefox is wonderful. It’s up there with chocolate and sex on the grand scale of great things about being alive.

– Kate Bevan in the Guardian. Amen!

Rejoice, for the threat posed by terrorists is no more! Transperth have pulled down the “if you see something, say something” posters over the stairs at the Busport, replacing them with posters for their community consultation sessions — one of which I attended some time ago. (I would have photos, but my batteries weren’t charged …)

Clearly, we can stop being fearful now. And if I do see a Arab-looking person carrying a sack of ammonium nitrate, well, I dunno, I think I might forget what to do.

On the note of buses: my ride home today was on a shiny new natural gas bus, complete with the lovely smell of fresh synthetic seat covering. It seems Swan Transit have finally gotten in on the CNG-bus action (previously only Path and Southern Coast had them), and the new toys sport several design changes.

Back when the CNG buses first appeared I commented on the interior design, which seemed ugly at the time but has since grown on me. These newer natural gas buses feature sexy black plastic handles on the seats (not only is black the new black, it’s the new yellow!) and the surveillance camera mountings are much, much more subtle. Other changes include better lighting (with reading lights for the kids at the front) and … dig it … openable windows! But there are only four of them, and they’re small, so I doubt they’re of any real use.

The new gas buses also seem to have addressed (albeit perhaps not solved) the annoying violent gear-shift problems of the older ones. Yay for not feeling like I’m being beaten up by the playground bully every time I’m on a bus …

As part of this week’s ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, and in the leadup to Friday’s ASEAN Regional Forum, it was reported today that Timor-Leste intends to join ASEAN.

Considering how little I can find in (the shiny and new!) Technorati, I suspect few people are interested by this. So I’ll comment about it, particularly because I’m fascinated
(hey, it brings together something I’ve been blogging about with something I’m studying!)

First up, it should be noted that this isn’t really a sign of improved stability in Timor-Leste; the old government had been in negotiations to get down with the ASEAN kids for months before the current unrest. Mr Ramos-Horta was at last year’s ASEAN Regional Forum, and there was even talk of him attending the next East Asia Summit.

The announcement does, however, cast some doubt over the old hopes of ASEAN leaders for a nicely rounded clique of ten (which they finally got in 1999). When Timor-Leste first won its independence, some folk in the region said it was more Melanesian than Southeast Asian, and thus didn’t belong in ASEAN. That sentiment has since been overridden by the more widespread belief (particularly strong among the Singaporeans) that ASEAN and its spawn should be inclusive and welcoming to anyone who’s entitled to join.

I doubt that joining ASEAN (if and when it happens, since this announcement is just a statement of intent) will have much impact on the Timorese themselves, except perhaps to help legitimate their government overseas. Whether that’s a good thing is unclear — the last person to have been in the region whom I’ve spoken to was convinced the new leadership is far from clean.

I am vaguely concerned about the effect of continued expansion on ASEAN. Then again, the late-90s naysayers were wrong to claim that picking up Burma and Cambodia would ruin the group, so maybe there’s nothing to be worried about. Actually, it’s quite likely ASEAN will just keep plodding along like it always has, talking lots while making steady (but glacially slow!) progress towards integration.

Timor-Leste, meanwhile, will plod along in poverty, still short of stability or much-needed economic growth …

Here at work in the space of two hours or so this morning, we’ve had:

• the student home directory fileserver die, so no one could log in
• problems with the printing server
• problems with computers refusing to talk to the authentication servers
• and the campus SMTP server melt, meaning no mail for anyone (although yay! that one is Someone Else’s Problem)

I swear, the undergrads have wrought upon us a curse. Or something.

*sigh*

I’ve long had my doubts about e-tax, the Tax Office’s supposedly “easy” solution for lodging individual tax returns electronically. Not only is it a Windows-only application, it’s a poorly designed Windows application. Heck, that much is obvious from the kludgy Win16-style interface.

But this evening I discovered just how poorly designed it is. Suppose your default printer in Windows is a network printer, in my case a home multifunction shared over plain old SMB (the default Windows printer sharing). Supposed said printer and the computer it’s attached to are offline, because you have no reason to turn them on right now. Try opening e-tax.

You get the delightful message “access violation at address 0055F9C0 in module ‘etax2006.exe’. Read of address 00000008.”

Solution: change your default printer, or turn on the network printer. Cos, you know, you absolutely must have a printer ready and raring when you type in your tax file number.

So what’s Zune? It’s Microsoft’s new, holistic approach to music and entertainment.

Wow, Microsoft (finally) confirmed the existence of their ‘iPod killer’ today.

Few details about the device(s) beyond what’s already known, but there’s some vague info on the semi-official blogs of Cesar Menendez (source of the quote) and Richard Winn, two of Zune’s marketeers. Said blogs feature videos from YouTube, have a very Scoble-esque personal touch, and even link to various unofficial Zune blogs. This is definitely not the Microsoft of old.

The only other official announcements are a teaser ad and a slightly disturbing Flash animation.

It’s obviously far too early to pass any serious judgement on this thing, but the early signs are that Microsoft (or at least this product group) actually get it. They’re talking about moves straight out of the playbooks of MySpace, Last.fm, and perhaps also Pandora. If that’s the case, I’d be worried for the iPod — I dare say that even Apple’s mindshare monopoly over the word ‘cool’ is no match for the power of properly-executed social media services.

(via TechCrunch, et al.)