phik

Someone asked me yesterday who, at this early stage, I’m supporting for President in 2008. I am not a registered member of either major party, and even though there are 400 people running, it is not a difficult decision.

Dr. Ron Paul (R-TX) is the only candidate with a philosophy that’s based on liberty.

I know that you’ve already closed this window, but just in case you hit the wrong button or there’s a bug in your browser, I’m going to keep going.

Forget about the fact that he was elected (this time) as a Republican. Look at his record.

If liberty is not your single most important issue — and, by the way, why not? — perhaps these notes will interest you:

• If ending the Iraq war is your hot-button, there is no surer vote you could cast to put an end not only to this war, but the entire doctrine that led to it. No other candidate talks as seriously about not just recalling troops, but ending the entire foreign policy nightmare of police actions and empire-building.
• If you oppose the PATRIOT act and the “war on terror”, he was one of only three Republicans to vote against it.
• If you believe that most issues — from drug policy to gay (or, for that matter, heterosexual) marriage — should be decided by the states individually, then step away from that noose! You can for the first time support a candidate who remembers our constitution.
• CNET ranked members of the 109th Congress by their voting records on technology issues; Dr. Paul received the highest score of the entire Congress.
• He’s taken a stand against the poisonous REAL ID national ID scheme that the EFF and ACLU oppose so strongly.

Until last month I’d never made a political contribution in my entire life. And to everyone who sighs, election after election, about the lack of principled, common-sense politicians, I urge you to contribute while our money still has any chance of making a difference.

To reward you for sitting through all that, I bring you copyright violation of the highest calibre: NewsRadio. Trust me that these are the most choice selections, the finest cuts, the most tender, succulent morsels of an already above-average whole. In approximate order of hilarity:

The Real Deal
The Cane
Airport
I think something’s wrong with this chair
Cadbury
Dave’s secret
Rocket Fuel
He has a problem with Carl
Superb range
Moustache
Interviewing Bill Clinton

If you have not yet partaken of at least the first four seasons, then you are perilously close to missing out on a towering figure in the television pantheon.

I finally got my scuba diving ticket this week, after three weeks’ delay due to unrelenting respiratory illness. I did my final open water dives with a great bunch of guys who work eight-on/six-off fly-in/fly-out shifts in the mines. As someone who more or less sets his own schedule, it will be nice to have other people around who can go diving in the middle of the week.

My underwater camera is still en route from the nifty fifty (thanks joe!), so I don’t have any photographs of my own, but Rottnest Island is popular enough that we can all live vicariously through flickr in the meantime. I’m going to try to get into a group diving on the HMAS Swan at the end of the month, by which time I should hopefully have a reasonable underwater camera.

Also: just in case someone Googles for scuba diving or dive shops in Perth, I want them to learn about Diving Frontiers. They were extremely professional, particularly in the one instance where something went wrong (they accidentally gave me an empty tank, which I only noticed when I tested it that night). It’s the sort of shop where you can call the owner’s cell phone and expect him to solve the problem at 22h.

They were flexible when I got sick; their instructors were clearly very experienced; and they were definitely teachers, not just divers. From my minimal research, they also seem to be the least expensive dive shop in the area, for both equipment and training. Recommended without hesitation.

Something this week jogged my memory of the iconic original-Mac classic Dark Castle, and I was intent on — nay, determined to — emulate my way to victory and spend the weekend thusly engaged.

the title screen was the high-water mark

To be clear, I didn’t actually own an original Mac or Dark Castle, but my friend’s dad did, and he was extremely accomplished. He had the fireballs and the shields and the hoo-has and the what-nots, and his in-game acrobatics generally made the Prince of Persia look like a Koopa Troopa, whatever that means.

Suffice it to say that I was mesmerized whenever he played it, and believed almost without question that, by not owning a Mac myself, I was missing out on one of the greatest game experiences 1986 had to offer. I believe I used those exact words when I described to Deb how I was spending my Saturday afternoon.

I also assumed that, with suitable practise, I too could vanquish all comers. Some twenty years on, I like to think of myself as a pretty smooth operator when it comes to this sort of thing.

This was not to be. I will state for the record, unabashedly, that I am terrible at the game and show no signs of further improvement. I would like to tell you that this is because the interface is difficult to master and the controls are unforgivably imprecise — which is true — but the fact is I probably just suck.

I think I really just like the idea of Dark Castle more than the actual experience. A game that involves climbing and jumping around a castle with bats and guards and evil lords seems like it should be inherently fun, and quite frankly I’m disappointed that this particular representation hasn’t aged as gracefully as I’d imagined.

But don’t let my opinion stop you; here’s the how-to. For science.

1. Download Mini vMac. It appears to be excellent software.
2. Download the MacPlus ROM and the Finder image from this handy guide.
3. Download the game itself.
4. Download the blank disk images and unpack the 8M HFS image.
5. Boot Mini vMac from the Finder image, mount the 8M HFS image, and format it into a bootable disk. I don’t know why you have to do this, but if you don’t, the game offers up some kind of complaint about memory allocation (time warp back to 1986: the complaint regarded something on the order of 10 kilobytes). Might as well mount and copy the Dark Castle disk into this image while you’re at it.
6. Reboot from that new image, et voila.

All that being said, watching what appears to be a fully-functional Mac Plus boot in less than a second is something of a religious experience.

Now that I’m back in the 1980s, I think I’m going to try to find a copy of Populous.

I did my first night dive last night, in the Swan River at the Jerrat Drive wreck site. It was both awesome and mildly (but irrationally) terrifying.

A few dozen meters off shore, there are two wrecks about 10 meters under: a World War 2-era barge and a Chinese junk, both of which have mostly disintegrated on the bottom. Nevertheless, they were teeming with life, filled with blue swimming crabs, Australian spotted jellyfish, and a dozen or more fish that I can’t possibly identify. But mostly it was useful as an orientation to the rigours of night diving.

I was briefly, and for no reason in particular, disorientated when I first reached the bottom and was waiting for the rest of the dive group. Once that passed it was pretty uneventful, although I felt like I spent a lot more time and energy maintaining my buoyancy and keeping up with the group than I did during any of my daytime dives. I assume this is just something I get used to, which is why I wanted to do a night dive or two before my advanced course.

Ah well. My underwater camera and flying kit should arrive on Monday, so it won’t be too much longer before you can skip the prose and get straight to the meat.

(If your last name is not Blizzard, you may wish to return tomorrow.)

I finally got around to doing my checkout in VH-MVD, a C172N (with the 180hp upgrade), at Jandakot today.

Jandakot is often referred to as the busiest airport in the southern hemisphere — which I cannot confirm — but it is unquestionably Australia’s busiest airport in terms of movements. It’s busy enough that, if you plan to stay and do circuits, you have to call Ground for an engine start clearance.

Like Bedford and Boston, Jandakot is underneath Perth’s class C (equiv. US class B) airspace — but Australia’s class C airspace is absolutely insane. Consider that around Boston Logan — an airport that recorded in 2006 almost exactly as many movements as Jandakot, and is therefore substantially busier than Perth International — the class B extends just 20 nm, with a ceiling of 7,000 feet, and a base of 3,000 feet in its outer 10nm ring.

Along some headings from Perth, on the other hand, you have to be more than 50 nm away before you can climb above 8,500 feet. And the class C has no ceiling within 22 nm (outside 22 nm, FL180), so it’s impossible to overfly a class C aerodrome unless you’re driving big iron.

Jandakot is further fenced in by a huge low-level military restricted zone to the south, and a SFC-FL160 military zone to the north, with a tiny VFR corridor carved out along the coast. The pilot-curious among you can examine the not-entirely-shabby Visual Guide for Perth.

Alas, the charts for Sydney and Brisbane show largely the same, shitty story. At least I’m checked out now. All that remains is for CASA to process my licence and security clearance, both of which I’m still too angry to write coherently about. I was hoping to do more flying in WA, but as long as everything gets sorted out in the four weeks before I leave for the east coast, it will not be a total failure.

From an interesting so-what-else-is-new article about the depressed Detroit housing market:

“Once we’ve seen the last person leave Michigan, then I think we’ll be able to say we’ve seen the bottom,” [Realtor Ron Walraven] said.

I eagerly await that glorious day, when we can begin the repopulation of Michigan with true American heroes: Ohioans.

DST ended in Australia this weekend; with luck, it will still be on the books in WA come December.

Perth is a bit of an odd city, and Western Australia an odd state; nowhere has this been more apparent than in the daylight saving debate. I already wrote about how parliament botched the introduction of DST, and it’s been nothing but media-stirred controversy the entire time I’ve been here.

Virtually every TV news program, it seems, commissions polls and canvasses the city looking for the most outspoken anti-DST crusaders who bemoan … what? That it’s too bright during dinner? Nobody has really explained to me why they want the sun to set at 19h. And frankly, only extremists with too much time on their hands are going to respond to $1/txt SMS polls. That this issue can even sustain a three-month news cycle boggles the mind.

Get a load of this tripe. People seriously claim that there will be more underage drunk driving because it stays light out until 8? I didn’t realize that early evening was when Perth kids like to “kick it.” Or that daylight saving would raise average temperatures. I particularly like the writer who can’t bear to spend an extra hour (aside: what extra hour?) with the kids. That must be rough for them.

It was quite a while before I met an actual human opposed to DST, but I did eventually, and the best reason they could come up with was that before daylight saving they didn’t need to put sunscreen on their kids after school. I don’t really buy this, since the UV index is so high in Perth that you can get sunburned by moonlight. Experts recommend a class 9, or Robin Williams, level of hair coverage.

At long last, I heard a reason that stands up to some degree of scrutiny: apparently, early summer mornings in WA generally have better beach conditions. According to the Perth Surf Life Savers, beachgoing is sharply down this summer because there’s simply not enough daylight before most people have to go to work, and it’s too hot and windy most evenings. This I can believe.

Like John, I don’t particularly buy into (or care about) the energy saving theory. I just can’t believe that people don’t like to sit out in their gardens, snags on the barbie, and have a few stubbies in the evening while it’s still light.

(And as someone who grew up ten degrees further from the equator, on the western edge of the time zone, even a 20h sunset is about two hours too early.)