Understand the mouse trap.

 In the office, in the home, the mouse is the modern-day courier. Scurrying around under your fingertips as you sit at the computer, the mouse is a highly efficient messenger, moving around important, well, messages.

 If you are not familiar with all the facets of the mouse, the following glossary is an essential reference for your home and your office. First, let’s consider if the mouse is a messenger misnomer. Could our reliable courier of critical information not have been called another critter?

 For example, what about the gazelle? It’s fast, smooth, can cover great distances with ease. But we are talking about modern technology. That won’t work. What about an Aussie version? The wombat, maybe? After a bit of a sleep-in, it grudgingly pushes around what information it can forage before retiring again for a nap. It has potential – but hold on – some species are endangered and we can’t have something that will become obsolete.

 A dog? It has lots of experience in moving information around. Sure, in the form of newspapers, so it may have to update its skills but it does follow commands. Well, most of the time. What if you needed it to fetch some information for your 10am meeting and it played dead instead? Hmm...

 So, the mouse it is, and it appears we have a plague of them at work and around the house. Let’s open the manual.

GLOSSARY:

Mouse: A small, hairy animal with four legs and a tail.

Hard drive: What the mouse experiences when the traffic is heavy and time is of the essence.

Mouse mat: Where the mouse likes to take a nap after a hard drive, usually in front of the fire.

Log on: What you need to do to the fire to keep the mouse warm.

Log in: The mouse is now warm. Thank you.

Log off: Don’t upset the mouse.

Log out: You have upset the mouse. Now it’s hungry.

Apple: What the mouse likes to eat.

Megabyte: What a very hungry mouse takes out of the apple.

App: A small apple for a mouse that is not so hungry.

Microsoft app: A very small and squishy apple.

Mouse over: The apple was bad and now the mouse is dead. Or does it just have flat batteries?

Right click the mouse: Turn the mouse on its side and click your fingers to see if it moves.

Left click the mouse: Turn the mouse on its other side and click your other fingers to see if it moves. No? Then call the help desk. That’s right, even the furniture is smarter than you. And you will need to speak its language to understand even the simplest of instructions. These basic terms may help.

Boot: Kick the computer to get it going. But that’s how all this mouse mess started!

Reboot: Again? Now we really are asking for trouble.

Backed up: That’s what you should have done to avoid this mouse mess.

Shut down: What your brain does when it’s had enough of technology. I recommend you grab a glass of wine and go and sit in front of the fire. Just mind the dead mouse.

The crushing of 12-year-old Ritchard (online blog).

BY: Andrew Bolt.

 THE bullying of Casey Heynes, a student at Sydney’s Chifley College, is a story meant to end with a happy-ever-after. You’ve already seen it sketched out on television, in the papers, on talkback and online.
 The theme is as old as human cruelty, and almost as popular. A friendless fat boy who has been picked on since primary school finally turns on his latest tormentor—some punk who punched him in the head, and shaped for more—and body-slams him into the concrete.
 One of the bully’s mates films the lot, as is now customary when someone is assaulted right in front of your snotty nose, and puts it up on YouTube, demonstrating that today’s children can be both morally retarded and technologically advanced. Bingo! Casey, who turns out to be emotionally wise at just 15, becomes a worldwide hero, and the bully an international villain…
 And straight away this nice morality tale—the revenge fantasy made flesh—starts to fall to pieces, and a long-neglected pit of misery lies exposed, right under our feet. You see, the bully, Ritchard Gale, is just 12 years old.
 How many people—let alone year 7 boys—have had so much hatred heaped on them this week, whether it’s through vilification on national television here and in the United States, or the most vicious emails and postings to internet sites?
 Here are some very typical examples among thousands, taken from postings to YouTube: “7 people thought Casey should have curb-stomped the f...er after he slammed him...if every bully like him died the world would be a better place”. No wonder that when Channel 7 decided for some cruelly selfish reason to interview Ritchard on Today Tonight—and I repeat, he’s just 12—he finally started to cry.
 His father Peter also cried, from fear and the pain of humiliation more public and more personal than he could ever have believed possible.
 “All I’m going to say is ‘Stop’,” he wept. “We’ve had enough.”
But nothing is so merciless as righteous indignation, and the bullying of Casey Heynes has in turn licensed the inner bully in so many adults, who now do to a 12-year-old what they claim to deplore when he did it to Casey. Have you ever before seen a mere boy stuck on a chair on national television to be told he’s a bully with an “anger problem” who should say sorry?
 It’s scandalous. Who is looking after his interests? What money changed hands to buy his public scolding?
 And what possible good do all these finger-waggers imagine they are doing, throwing this boy into the maw of their great ratings monster? It is perfectly true Ritchard acted like a thug, even if we were to accept as true his claim that Casey had been “calling me an idiot and stuff”.
 But that ‘t’ in his name—a semi-literate protest against the sheer ordinariness of the underclass—already hinted at what seeing him and his father confirmed. Ritchard has a rat’s-tail haircut and a stud in his eyebrow—more cries of assertion through store-bought rebellion.
 He was caught between defiance and pride at this attention, at last, and the sorry that his father had to signal him into making. He claimed to have been bullied himself at school until he’d resolved to hit those who’d hurt him, much as we now cheer Casey for having done: “If people say stuff I just chase ‘em. Hit ‘em.”
 Indeed, that YouTube video starts with Ritchard confronting Casey with: “Have you been talking s...?” And then we see Ritchard’s father, with missing teeth, exhausted eyes and wild hair, as if dragged through life backwards by his ankles.
 As we may have guessed, he’s separated from Ritchard’s mother, also missing teeth and defiant. “Not making excuses, but it’s been hard for me,” he pleads. “I’ve been trying to do the right thing by him and teaching him the right ways.” Uh huh. And what are the right ways to get on in North St Mary’s, a suburb that the local council’s social plan valiantly describes as “a typical post-war working-class Australian community”, to which has been added large Pacific Islander and Arabic-speaking communities, plus the leavings of the welfare state—part of that exciting diversity we’re told in Government ads is our “strength”.
 There the Chifley College’s Dunheved Campus, which Casey and Ritchard both attend, battles the uneasy consequences, noting on its website that “our families come from 15 diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds”.
 Absenteeism is high, academic results are low and the school warns (or merely concedes) that it imposes “reasonable and fair discipline that fosters resilience in our students”. So how did such fostering of “resilience” work for Casey?
 Now in year 10, he says he has been bullied for eight years. One punch broke something in his nose. He was duct-taped to a pole. The fear and loneliness, he says, made him contemplate suicide.
 He claims he wrote more than 60 incident reports to the school about the bullying, yet never got a break from the harassment. Any suspended student soon came back. Oh, yes, blame the school, if you wish. Many have, hacking into its website and sending foul abuse to the principal.
 But have any of you worked in such a school, with such parents and such children? Have you any idea what some of our grimmer suburbs are really like, where a boy like Ritchard can even now consider a lecture from Today Tonight as a seeming sign of success, and smile? Blame the school, but note that Casey’s father, also missing teeth, says he had no idea his son had been quite so bullied these past eight years. None.
 “How many years have you put up with this sort of treatment?’ he asked rhetorically. (Of Casey’s mother we hear nothing.) Oh, pray for these kids. If you’ve seen Casey, you’d agree there is something there to save. He has a level-headedness. An insight. A modesty. A clarity of expression and phlegmatic disposition: “School isn’t going to last forever.”
 In another environment I wonder what might be made of him. But now he and his father have decided he won’t be going back to school, or at least not to this one. Maybe, he says, he’ll one day go to a TAFE college. For now, at least, Casey has the world’s attention and an affirmation any such boy, so lonely for so long, would crave. Would need. “I’ve never had so much support,” he grins shyly.
 And as he checks all his messages of support, the television shows again and again what won him this fame and approval: again and again, we see him picking up a 12-year-old and hurling him onto the concrete, head first, back first, neck first, leg first, whatever…
 And today, in hard-scrabble towns and suburbs around this divided land, the mutinously anonymous sons of defeated anonymous parents slope from their torn and impassive homes to brave the asphalt battlegrounds of their torn and impassive schools.
 What have we just taught them? Have we any idea what we’re doing? 

Would you brake for a cane toad? A kangaroo? A cat?

 Drivers should slow down, be aware, and avoid killing native animals without putting their own lives in danger. Other animals, though, may not deserve so much care. You shouldn’t run down kangaroos, for example - but cats could be another matter. Wicked Campers - providers of psychedelic patchouli and body odour-scented vans to cash-strapped backpackers dependent on two-minute noodles and goonbags - are in strife.

 They had stickers on 1000 of their hire vans that read: "Kangaroo’s: run the f(*&kers down’’ (in some instances it was `run the buggers down’). Once you quell the red-raw rage that comes from the inappropriate use of apostrophes, you’ll realise it’s also a fairly abhorrent idea. Boss John Webb defended the stickers.

 He said his kangaroo-loving clients risked rolling the campers when they swerved to save the life of our emblematic animal. So he advised them to mow them down instead. That excuse was never going to stop the righteous animal activists of the world from having a crack. OK, they’re right that it was stupid, inappropriate and probably encouraged our backpacking brethren to target poor roos. Not to mention a roo is likely to leave you in a bad, bad way if you hit it. So, overall, stupid. But they don’t have to be so earnest about it. I digress.

 There may be a place for a `run the f***ers down’ campaign, perhaps with a little less outright aggression. But it’d have to be far more strategic. Certainly any pegless clothesline, Leatherman and Teva-toting visitor to our shores - or any grey nomad or Britz van driver for that matter - should learn it is acceptable - nay, desirable - to mow down cane toads. Make that one a national sport.

 Cats? Ah, cats. Ferals are not worth slowing down for - but the problem is the difficulty telling whether the slinking creature in front of you is a wild beast that will single handedly eat every last surviving purple-crested bandiroo, or if it’s Auntie May’s sole, toothless companion. But hypothetically speaking, if you can see that it’s the former rather than the latter, the world is a better place without it.

 Hares aren’t killers, but they are pests, so don’t feel too guilty if one of them goes under the wheels. Foxes you should never feel too bad about - although baby foxes are bloody cute, the sight of a chicken that’s met one of the deadly ginger bastards is most decidedly not.

 The main problem is you just don’t generally have time (especially on country roads) to work out whether the moving thing up ahead is friend or foe. And I’m not sure how many people would, even once they’ve identified that the potential roadkill is something that should be eradicated, have the intestinal fortitude to deliberately run it over.

 Roadkill. It’s a fact of life. But all drivers should be trained - maybe using one of those movie-style shooting practice ranges where different silhouettes pop up - what is worth even attempting to avoid.

And judging by the amount of decomposing roos I’ve seen on the side of the road lately, plenty of drivers could use a refresh. But no one should feel they need to jam on the brakes, putting their own life at risk, to avoid hitting one of our many deadly and destructive pests.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/travel/news/wicked-campers-rapped-for-stickers-encouraging-drivers-to-run-down-kangaroos/story-e6frg8ro-1226000835046

Going nuts!

 We bought some safari chairs to sit on for a bit of comfort around the plastic patio table. A safari chair is a lot like a director’s chair – in fact, it would be the chair a director takes on safari. But the point is, we arrived home with the two chairs nicely packaged in a couple of flat(ish) packs. I opened them to find instructions, a few wingnuts and the fabric for the seats loose in the ever-present clear plastic bag. I felt cheated. The words weren’t there on the box. You know those words, the catchphrase words that symbolised the get-the-furniture-home-quickly-in-as-many-pieces-as-it-takes 21^st century: ‘Some assembly required’.

 You probably think this should be no problem. Well, yes. But you only do it yourself in materials that you can work with. The thing about the chipboard-based modern furniture is that if you do try and work with it using ordinary tools, you tend to be left with a pile of wood chips and bent laminate.

 They pre-drill their furniture in the factory because they know how to do it, and they aint telling us. So it’s not do-it-yourself. Somebody else has already done it. It’s doing what somebody else has already done. Self re-assembly. There’s no challenge, unless you strike it lucky and get something from one of the new Asian boom economies, where everything is lost in the translation. When you don’t have ABC in your alphabet and the person translating is a backpacker trying to earn enough for his plane fare home, step-by-step instructions become one step forward, three steps back and two to the side. That’s when self-assembly furniture is fun!

 I blame the Europeans. They made self-assembly compulsory for their furniture. They couldn’t have done it without that bloke Allen. You know, then inventor of the Allen key. And just to turn the last chipboard screw with the plastic dome insert in the coffin of ready-made furniture, they came up with cute names for cupboards, wardrobes and even bookcases. ‘Have you met Bjorn? That’s him with the books. Next to Vince, the magazine rack!’

 Now don’t get me wrong. They make good products, and at affordable prices. I’ll rephrase that, you make their good products. Any book looks good in a Bjorn. It’s just that it seems wherever you shop now, instead of the old six-to-eight-week wait, you buy the furniture, put it in the car and, provided all the parts are there, assemble it by dinner-time. Fair enough in the case of something bulky. But safari chairs? Surely something which folds up to stack away can be put in a box in on piece?

 Machines can do everything except actually put the stuff together. So the furniture manufacturers include us in their workforce. You, brothers and sisters, are unpaid labour for giant multinational sofa-bed and side-table conglomerates. People on the other side of the world are growing rich on the fruits of your labour. As I look around my bedroom, I realise that I assembled the small desk this computer sits on, the television cabinet on wheels, and even had to put the back on the chair I’m sitting in. How does anybody ever get any work done when we’re spending all our time doing it for furniture companies?

 Won’t be long before computer companies cotton and we’re putting in motherboards and hard disks ourselves. With Allen keys. It’s the thin edge of the wedge. We’ve got to put a stop to it now or nothing will come to you as a finished item.

 This blog comes to you via Ralph, an IBM 386SX clone. Some assembly required. Here’s the last sentence. Nreightdfjspo ioinre??/ !! ---,... 4. Please follow the instructions on page 865 carefully.