Look! It’s me!

Douglas Adams was credited with noticing that the phrase “as pretty as an airport” isn’t exactly in common parlance. Another Douglas noted that Vancouver’s airport is actually fairly pretty, for an airport. Douglas Coupland said that it’s a crash course in Vancouver style – lush greens, lots of glass, etc etc.

Well it’s no surprise that YVR has been voted among the world’s best airports – beating (among others) the far more melodiously-named Tullamarine in Melbourne.

I find Garfield relentlessly unfunny. Barely gets a grin out of me. It’s no surprise that it’s basically written by a focus group to achieve the widest possible audience – much like commercial pop music.

Anyway, there’s now Garfield minus Garfield, which is simply Garfield comics edited to remove the title character. They’re brilliant works of social commentary, wacky and insightful in an absurd kind of way.

Tanks to Gruber for the link.

This is really nifty. Here’s an optical illusion that will turn a black-and-white photograph into a colour one.

As seen in The Age today:

That’s such BS. Microsoft loves making huge announcements and not following them up. I’m taking this with a huge grain of salt. As usual, Fake Steve hits the nail on the head.

Up until quite recently, everything was all about Microsoft. They were the centre of the technology universe. Whenever anyone did something, they had to think about Microsoft in some way or another. Before them, it was IBM. Now it’s Google. Microsoft’s reign at the top of the heap is over, this is the beginning of their slide into IBM-style irrelevance (which, admittedly, is less irrelevant than, say boo.com, but they’re a shadow of their former self).

Here’s a Gates quote, heralding the beginning of the end.

We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today, that we’ll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer, and that we can pursue without that.

Our apology today is not the first time we’ve felt sorry and said it. Arthur Phillip, first governor of New South Wales, showed rare-for-the-time insight into how Australia’s native people felt about this invasion of sunburnt Englishmen:

“I am sorry to have been so long without knowing more of these people… they certainly are not pleased with our remaining among them.” (Arthur Phillip, 1788, on the Aboriginal people of Australia)

Shame he didn’t really seem to do anything about it, things could have been quite different.

I’m pretty good at working up a nice presentation (Keynote rocks my socks). The main rule for doing good prezo is don’t show up naked. You’d be surprised how many people here forget that one.

No, the actual big rule is don’t read your slides. Gruber linked to an excellent step-by-step guide to making sure the presentation you’re making is a good one. There are some excellent tips in there on how to design slides and the language to go along with them.

This dovetails nicely with what I’m up to now in real life. I’ve signed up for the PBS announcer’s course, with a view to eventually having my very own radio show on a real honest-to-goodness radio station. Golly. Last night, we learnt about writing for the radio – it’s similar to writing for presentations, which I’m used to. It’s important to be quick and punchy, far more conversational and simplistic than traditional journalistic or fiction writing.

So. We’re spending a billion dollars on a ticketing system that we don’t need, and which may be delayed for the third time.

We’re spending another half billion dollars on dredging the bay to accommodate more shipping containers that we have no infrastructure to support. This will likely result in spending ten billion dollars on a kinda-proposed tunnel under a couple of parks and a graveyard because of all the increased truck traffic. I’m not even considering the environmental impact of all this stuff. Total cost of useless projects? Eleven and a half billion dollars. Based on a population of about five million people, it’s $2300 per Victorian. That’s madness.

Note that most of the world’s biggest ports are moving out of the cities that gave birth to them. The land is worth too much to use for industrial purposes, and there’s no room for expansion.

Elect me! I will:

• Move the bloody port to Hastings, which has a naturally deep channel, decent rail connections, and room to expand. Fewer trucks on the roads in Melbn, hence no tunnel required.
• Cancel the damn ticketing system and spend that money on building more train lines to suburbs that don’t have them. Hell, for all that money, the trains could run for free: 170 million trips a year at $3.50/trip means that 11.5 billion dollars buys us free trains for nearly 20 years. There wouldn’t be any expansion happening, but I don’t see any happening right now anyway.

I don’t see how these two things could end up costing more than 11.5 billion dollars, really. We could build ourselves a very nice port and upgrade the train system quite well for $11,500,000,000. No tunnel required.

Doesn’t take much of a visionary to see that, Brumby.

As usual, Fake Steve hits the nail on the head with regards to the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. Here’s the money quote:

It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster. Here’s the weird thing: I first heard that line about the 100-yard dash from Ballmer himself, maybe a decade ago.

This move casts the industry in a new light. It’s confirmed now: it’s all about Google. Microsoft, like IBM before it, has officially started to fade from relevance.