Sport

I find it strange that although every sporting team that you support can lose their respective sporting event during the weekend, the weekend can still be classed as a great weekend. Take the weekend that has just passed for instance; you may or may not know that I am an avid Forumla 1 fan and when the melbourne grand prix comes around all other tasks for the weekend become priority number 2 (meaning they never get done).
Being a true Australian I support Mark Webber on his quest to winning the world championship (which should be in the bag this year) but this year I have started a dream team for Formula 1 (Weird I know, how do you even score that?!?) so it has meant that my support has been distributed further than just Red Bull.
To summarise a very complex system of the dream team you have a set budget and you have to pick 4 drivers, 2 cars and a team. In all my wisdom I thought that Mercedes had some pretty good pre-season testing, were cheap, had Schumacher and Rosberg two great drivers and would probably win out of the mid range cars (so average maybe a 6-8th placing). In addition, for my drivers I choose Mark Webber (of course) two other drivers (that you don't need to know about) and Rubens Barrichello a great sensible, reliable driver (who for some strange reason had to be my double pts guy). This was all looking pretty good and I was confident going into the weekend. However come race day Barrichello decides to crash into Rosberg taking both of them out of the race and then Schumacher then had to retire for some reason I can no longer remember, Mark decided to fail once again and came 5th and so all in all the race was a complete disaster.
However it was still great! Having the season back on and watching all the improvements to all the cars was brilliant! Mark Webber could have had a season ending crash and I probably would have still loved the weekend.

Secondly; my sister, her husband and I went and saw the ACT Brumbies saturday night at Canberra Stadium. They are our local Rugby Union team and we normally go down to the pub on a fri/saturday night and watch their games. This year has been a bit of a flop for the Brumbies, however this week was the grudge match - the one we had to win. Our opponents were the Waratahs a team from just across the border and this is always the Australian match to watch, the local derby, the battle of the greats, the one you need to win... and we were confident of a win.

We lost... on the siren. Pretty much the worst way to lose, apart from the previous match where the scoreline was 52-10 and it was just embarrassing.
But even that can't ruin a great sporting weekend, it's great! If you want to know the secret to a great weekend then just watch sport... or if you don't like sport then uh, go shopping or something...

So what have we learnt this weekend? a) Sport is great, b) Peter took a really long time to blog this post considering the weekend was 4 days ago...

Petey

Fireworks

Canberra had a heavy dose of fireworks last night, I always find it funny that I generally enjoy the period leading up to the fireworks more than the fireworks themselves. I'm sure many people are in my boat too, sure all those big bangs and bright flashes are fun but it's the catching up with people you haven't seen for a while or meeting new people that always seems to be more enjoyable. It's strange that in these days people would never just go to a park and enjoy an afternoon in the sun with other people but would easily spend an afternoon on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin in the rain and cold just to see some fireworks.

One thing thats good about the fireworks is seeing the "new" firework for that year, generally it's some shape that I'm sure wouldn't be easily to make, before it's been love hearts, smiley faces, etc. This year (I'm sure I'm about to be corrected on this) it was a moon shaped firework, or at least I don't think I've ever seen a moon shaped firework before, what they should do is take suggestions for the next "new" firework, maybe next year it could be the apple logos shape, I'd respect that.

Just one more note about fireworks; the soundtrack. Now this year we weren't very near a radio to be able to hear the songs in the background which does sort of detract from the whole experience but we were able to hear glimpses of songs. Now what I really want to know is whether Katy Perry purposefully made a song titled "firework" because surely she knew that it would be played at pretty much all firework shows around the world. If you think about it, it's a pretty good marketing strategy because you've almost guaranteed that millions of people would hear the song whilst enjoying their time watching fireworks, genius! Maybe I should make a song called "I love New Year fireworks" or something similar...

Wow, a whole blog post without mentioning politics... I'd better not ruin it and let you go, don't forget to post a comment below about how much you love the idea of an apple logo shaped firework.

Petey

Just a quiet week

It's been over a full week of independence now and a lot of things have changed, not only in my life but the world! My brother-in-law has started mocking me about my blog's title "life's intermission"; he says that intermissions generally come in the middle of a play and so I must now be in the middle of my life and thus either quite old (middle aged!) or am not going to live for much longer. I have proceeded to mention to him that there can be more than one intermission in a play and thus I am in the first of what could be a few "intermissions", I think he's feeling a bit insecure about being middle aged himself and so wants someone else to be in his position so that they can be a comfort to him :D

It's been a big week for news, it feels like as soon as an event occurs on the news something much bigger and worse wants to push it out of the headlines. First we had the carbon tax announcement (which for Australia is a big thing), next Libya decided to have a civil war, and finally Japan is now having it's worst disaster since World War 2.

I think being an engineer at heart causes me to be particularly interested in man-made distasters because we should have been clever enough to stop them! Sure the nuclear situation was a direct result of a tsunami but we should have already planned for this and have measures to prevent such problems that we are now facing.

So if you're like me and are interested in the nuclear situation in Japan then there have been some considerably good interviews on lateline over the last couple of nights that you should check out.

First there was an interview from Malcolm Grimstom (http://bit.ly/ftogNU) who is from the energy, environment and development program at Chatham House, this interview was two nights ago and so is a little out dated considering there's been another explosion since then, but he still has good insights and is worth a read or you can watch the interview from a link on the site.

And last night Dr Peter Karamoskosht (http://bit.ly/e30YyF) was on and he also spoke well about the nuclear situation in Japan, because it is more recent he has more information then the Malcolm and so has a bit more of an accurate picture of how this might turn out.

However both scientists made it quite clear that we are entering a situation with a lot of unknowns and even after 4 days it is still impossible to see how this situation will pan out. This is a huge learning curve for the scientists currently in Japan and around the world and hopefully from this disaster we can implement new safety measures that can prevent this from ever occurring again.

I highly recommend reading both transcripts to get a better view on the terrible situation currently unfolding in Japan.

My last point on this topic is about Europe's sudden change on it's view of nuclear power, because of this disaster the European Union has called an emergency meeting to debate the future of Europe's 150 odd nuclear power plants. Germany has just shut 7 of it's power plants and Switzerland has now halted 3 plants currently in the approval process as well. I think however the UK Secretary of State for Climate has it right that: "The biggest earthquake that the UK has ever suffered was back in 1931 and the Japanese earthquake I am sorry to say is 130,000 times stronger than the strongest ever recorded in the UK."

This might spark up some heated debate, but while nuclear power does have it's dangers you shouldn't be changing policy because of a natural disaster that you should never face, nuclear power to Europe is no more dangerous than it was a week ago it just feels like Europe has now entered into a state of panic and should calm down a bit.

Anyway on a lighter note here are a couple of other stories from this week that may have gone unnoticed otherwise:

Firstly the clock counting down to the London Olympics broke within the first day of it being operational which on is own is quite entertaining but the London 2012 spokesman came up with a gem of a quote: "Whilst the clock has stopped, and Omega is trying to sort it out, it does not give us additional time to stage the Games."

Secondly I was invited to a lovely party this week on facebook, however so were another 200,00 people and so they decided to cancel it. I was quite looking forward to a trip up to chatswood (Sydney) to wish Jess a happy 16th birthday but unfortunately the police will be up there now and they always seem to dampen the mood at parties... It did manage to make international news though! http://nydn.us/fN4G9k. Happy birthday Jess!

Anyway I was worried that this post might have been a short one but I think I just proved myself wrong! Hopefully you managed to come out the other side alive, and while you're trying to recover why not post a comment below and complain about my view on nuclear power or on something else that I discussed!

Petey

Carbon Emissions

Unless you've been living under some sort of rock (hopefully a comfortable one) for the past few days then you should have heard about the governments cuffuful (pronunciation: ka-fa-full) over their global warming plan for the next few years. All in all they haven't done a very good job of spruking it to the general public, as Tony Windsor was discussing the other night on lateline they've provided a framework for a carbon tax but have left a lot of empty spaces where the opposition can fill in the blanks with whatever they want to destroy the plan and thus the government. So although they might have a good framework for some action against Global Warming it's getting kicked to pieces, along with their credibility.

What I do love is that currently the biggest destruction** Global Warming has caused is the careers of 2 Australian prime ministers. One who announced his action plan against climate change and was promptly backstabbed from his own party and the second who currently has taken an 11 point beating in the polls and if she doesn't recover it quickly could face the same fate as her predecessor (although unlikely it sure would be fun!)

For an avid liberal it's great fun watching the Labor party squirm but thats not what I want to discuss.

Opinion Polls - What I really don't understand with these huge swings in polls is that either some people are just really indecisive and change their mind at the slightest new legislation or there's something wrong with the way we poll people. Now sure over a controversial piece of legislation some people might choose to vote for the opposing party if they disagree, but 11%?!? Lets say that a mere 66% of the public are voting adults then this 11% swing would correspond to 2 million people. How could that many people change their minds over just a framework of a carbon tax, it hasn't even been debated on the house's floor yet! Lets see where thing is going people!

How do we poll people anyway? Do we call maybe a couple of thousand people, ask them how they vote and tally it up against last months results? So say the pollers choose by chance a really pro-liberal group, could that cause a huge swing towards the liberals or do they have guards against that? Does anyone really take polls seriously when being polled?!? If we took two polls at the exact same time could we get two completely different results? Hopefully not, but maybe it's worth looking in to...

Anyway hopefully someone has the answer and I can sleep better at night.

See you next time, and don't forget to leave me a comment!

Petey

*N.B - In no way am against global warming being real, in fact I think it is a huge threat to the planet and we really should do something about it, and it may well have had already caused bigger destructions than peoples careers but it's not as evident yet.

Hello World

Welcome!

I congratulate you for stumbling across my blog, and I hope you enjoy your stay!

Many people have different reasons for creating blogs, some because they have an opinion and feel that everyone else must hear their amazing thoughts, others because they're lonely and just want someone to pay attention to them and then there are people who have or will be losing some connection with people and want a way for others to hear about what they are up to whilst they are away.

I fall into the third category. Kinda.

Before I continue I'd better tell you about myself; I'm a young guy studying software engineering at the ANU in Canberra, Australia. I love all things computers, especially if it has the letter "i" at the beginning on the word, and I love and am fascinated by the social movements created by such huge websites such as facebook and twitter. I have dabbled in blogging before, back in my school days I wrote a blog called Cruwysing through I.T (http://cruwysmissile.blogspot.com) where each lesson my classmates and I wrote a post about that lessons occurrences, check it out hopefully it is entertaining.

In addition to my love for computers, I enjoy politics and the constant bickering of politicians, of which I admittedly join in by yelling (some call it debating) at my T.V, and study political science on the side at uni.

In case that isn't enough I love taking photos of things, and an afternoon going hunting for a photo is my idea of fun and how I can get a break from the world. Maybe later I'll post some photos but I really should get back to my original point of why I'm writing this blog of which I doubt anyone is still reading anymore because I ramble so much.

I moved out of home just 2 days ago and so I decided to write a blog about my experiences of "independence" so that those who used to be around me (my family) can continue to stalk me and try to find out my every move whilst I no longer live at home. As well as this I have been thinking of creating a blog for some time now and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to do so, like the first group of people who write a blog I have an opinion and think that people should pay attention to what I say (don't we all!).

I named the blog "Life's Intermission" because I felt that it was kind of where I am at, I have just left home which was act 1 of my life and I'm now in a transition into act 2 which is settling down and having my own family. So like a play this is the intermission between the acts (however long that may be) which for some strange reason was always the best part of plays for me when I was younger! I know kind of a weird analogy but thats sort of who I am.

Anyway I better stop rambling and save that for later posts!

Leave a comment below if you're bored because no doubt I'll be bored and it'll entertain us both.

--

Petey