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I am more than pleased with the selection of pre-recorded voicemail messages offered by Vodafone.

For those of you not fortunate enough to be able to leave me a voicemail, I give you Steve Irwin’s finest work:

CRIKEY! This wonderf’ly ferocious creature ‘as got … phil schwan … firmly een its jaws! If anyone knows the next of kin, you bettah leave a message!

My only regret in this life is that I can’t bring Steve Irwin back from the dead to record a personalized voicemail greeting.

I’ll let Jacob tell you about Crikey/Blimey, the new reality show concept we’re pitching to FOX next week.

I’m staying with two friends during my time in Perth.

Stuart’s wife went to Malaysia on business before I arrived. She got sick.

He visited two weeks ago, for her last weekend there. They both came home. Sick.

It took two weeks, but it has pounced with ferocity, my body awash with billions of Malaysian viruses or perhaps bacteria.

I stayed home to watch cricket at stage 5 on the ICEC. Tomorrow and Sunday will require extreme application of stage 1, lest I have to cancel my difficult-to-schedule scuba lessons.

I’ve been quite fond of cricket for about eight years, which puts me in a distinct minority of Americans (or, indeed, North Americans). There were many Indian students at CMU, and for what I can only assume was their benefit, the campus cable TV network would occasionally carry satellite feeds of Indian cricket matches. It is an extremely good way to spend an afternoon and evening (or indeed five).

So it was with no small glee that I began to monitor Australian cricket in the run-up to my time here, and the devastation to which they subjected the English in this year’s Ashes. It was looking very much the same at the start of this year’s tri-series of one-day matches between Australia, England, and New Zealand, in the group stage of which Australia were 7-1.

This came crashing down rather abruptly, as Australia lost three in a row to England, the last two comprising the finals.

On the bright side, there are some surprisingly decent commercials during the cricket, which for reasons that I cannot possibly contemplate, the owners keep removing from YouTube. Preventing people from viewing them is a new and novel way to run an ad campaign.

I admit that I am somewhat late to the party on this one, but this one bit in an article about Red Hat moving to the NYSE caught my attention:

For example, … street teams will be traveling around Manhattan on Red Hat-branded Segway scooters handing out 20,000 Red Hat baseball caps.

Think about that for a second. NYSE contractors were canvassing Wall Street on Red Hat-branded Segways handing out Red Hat hats.

The little part of my brain that remembers hanging out at the old dingy Red Hat office in 1998 is trying to turn itself inside out.

This is confidential to my Perth readership, just in case one or more of the 1.5 million residents accidentally got this feed into their RSS readers and don’t know how to remove it.

To open my lecture series, Tuesday March 6th at 17:30 I will be performing for a live audience at iVEC, ARRC Auditorium, 26 Dick Perry Avenue, Technology Park, Kensington, Perth, Western Australia.

Maestro, if you please: Rumpshaker, or some reasonable facsimile!

“Seven Short Stories About Open Source”

“Open Source” is about as potent a buzzword as any modern technology phrase, but what does it really mean, and how does anyone involved turn a profit?

We’ll discuss seven companies that successfully incorporate open source concepts into their businesses. Some are well-known, others are not, but each has taken a different approach given their own distinct goals.

While it is technically an ACS event, anyone in need of my efficacious brand of sleep aid is welcome. But you do need to register.

Refreshments will be served.

I haven’t (to my knowledge) made any of my friends’ parents angry recently, so it’s time for a Becker-Posner update.

First up we have Becker advocating the elimination of tax deductions for health insurance entirely, but accepting the President’s proposed leveling of the playing field as a first step. I’d want to do everything possible to undermine the employment-based insurance scheme, but like Becker I will settle for a revenue-neutral proposal that removes the most egregious tax advantage helping to prop it up.

Posner takes a somewhat more radical view, arguing that subsidizing health insurance is wrong, millions of people lacking insurance is not a problem, and Medicare should be abolished. My only substantive disagreement is that some form of catastrophic coverage for everyone is probably a worthwhile goal, though by no means do I think this should be a single public insurer.

Moving on.

Water management has been vying for its spot as the number one political topic in Australia lately, although somewhat less so in Perth where we seem to be blessed with a more than adequate aquifer for the time being. As in the US, water pricing schemes appear to be largely flat, and conservation efforts appear to be largely aimed at residential users. There has also been an insane uproar about using “recycled water,” because it apparently makes a better news article to write “PREMIER WANTS TO DRINK SEWAGE” than to ask “where do you think the sewage goes now, into space?”

At any rate, Becker drops some science on us about floating water prices, water company privatization, and the gross mismanagement of agriculture that stems from artificially cheap water. Hear hear.

Nobody here knows about Ten Cent Beer Night.

Or the atrocities committed by the American pork industry