Happy new financial year, GrodsReaders! Hope everyone’s hangovers are manageable today after last night’s festivities. I had a pretty quiet one this time around so, being the dutiful Australian citizen I am, I woke up bright and early this morning ready to do my tax so I could send the Australian government any extra money that I might owe it without delay. After brewing a coffee and digging out my receipts and other tax detritus I logged onto the Australian Tax Office website to download the convenient e-tax software. Being a Mac user I was acutely aware that use of e-tax has been limited to PC Windows users since its launch, but I was sure that in 2009 a government department couldn’t still be refusing to support close to 10% of computer users.

It is.

And as it has been promising to do for the past few years (with fingers crossed behind its back), the ATO says it will still “continue investigating [making] e-tax available to different computer platforms.” What complete bullshit, I say. And as Craig would say, “It is the yeah two thousands!”

Word.

Everyone loves trying to summarise important speeches as Wordles, hoping the at-a-glance nature of the resulting graphic might give some insight into the speech’s themes. So I plugged Malcolm Turnbull’s press conference from this afternoon, announcing his intention to vote against the government’s emissions trading scheme, into Wordle to better understand it.

However, pretty as it may be, the Wordle didn’t really help me understand the thrust of Turnbull’s speech. So I went looking through the text for easy-to-understand metaphors and I found one.

We don’t want to get into a sort of Betamax/VHS debate here, you know where Kevin Rudd says I’ve got the best scheme and the rest of the world say, ‘yeah that’s very interesting Kevin, it’s very interesting but we’re not interested in adopting it because it’s from our point of view not practical’.

So I set this out graphically, for ease of translation.

Here’s Kevin Rudd’s technically-superior, yet unpopular ETS scheme:

And here’s the massively popular, yet inferior scheme favoured by the rest of the world:

And here’s the format offered by Malcolm Turnbull in the place of the government’s proposed scheme:

Laserdisc: experience the future of technology NOW

GrodsCorp has been struggling with the Mac vs. PC question for a while now. I’d like to announce that the war is finally over, and the all-conquering winner is Gateway 2000.

I have one of these and it still serves me well. I can spreadsheet on Lotus 123 before playing some Wolfenstein 3D with its incredible graphics and lifelike sound.

I’ll let you write the jokes, with me as the butt, in response to this story.

AN UNFORTUNATE LOGO which has somehow made it onto the Apple App Store appears to be a Freudian slip.

Its latest application for the Iphone is a product called Icount which seems innocent enough, if not a bit challenging for the average fanboy.

However the logo that accompanies the product seems to be arranged in a way so that the letter ‘o’ is dropped.

Go on. Do your worst.

(Thanks to reader Ant Rogenous who is so completely snowed under with work and life at the moment that he has no time to blog.)

Jason announces, via Twitter, that I and my technology choice are in fact the best.

You lose, Sears.

I’ve been holidaying in Queensland this past week in advance of my sister’s wedding next weekend. Been getting in some quality beach time on the coast and taking in some tunes at the Byron Bay Mud Festival. While laying on the sand, soaking up some rays, I’ve given some thought to why I think the National Broadband Network announced last week by Kevin Rudd is a bad idea.

1. The internets is totally fast enough already. Why would I ever need it faster? My web pages load up in a couple of seconds, my songs take a few minutes, and on the odd occasion I download a moofie I can chuck it on and cook dinner while I’m waiting. Anybody who says they need faster nets needs to learn the virtue of patience.
2. Why dig up all that ground just to pull up some copper cables and replace them with optical cables? Fair enough, it will create jobs and stuff but imagine the carnage to our roads, footpaths, fields and driveways. And anyway, why can’t we just chuck a couple of satellites in the air and give everyone a wireless dongle?
3. With the pace at which technology is changing there’s every chance that fibre optics will be obsolete before the ground has even healed. It’s silly investing so much money in something that might be superseded before we even get the chance to use it. Anyone remember dialup?
4. Figures such as $200 per month for internet access have been mooted. Just. Plain. Ridiculous.
5. We should spend the money on water. Or hospitals. Or roads.
6. How’s the government’s form building something publicly that should be built by the private sector? This is just Telstra 2.0.

Join with me, GrodsReaders, in opposing this blatant waste of taxpayers’ money.

Not to start anything again, but it seems that the battle between iPhones and BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?) is far from over.

From the New York Times, a disgruntled iPhone owner moaned:

[T]he iPhone probably sips, like a lipsticky girl with a vodka drink. It usually does things in a cute way. Whatever. At 4 in the morning, I was in bed, fighting rage. I couldn’t stop thinking about that device’s tarty little face and those yapping “apps” you can download for it. The whole iPhone enterprise seemed to require so much attention, organization, explanation, praise, electricity. I know — I know: in the morning, Apple’s latest miracle machine would fill my palm with meaning and magic. So why couldn’t I contain my annoyance? I had no new-thing excitement. It dawned on me: I hated my iPhone.

…

I refused to fight further with the smug phone. Off sailed my text — the work of a blithering idiot.

The morning after my sleepless night of charging the phone, a text message arrived from a colleague, about breakfast. It came up in a little dialogue bubble, as if we were characters in a comic book.

Now I had to reply. My throat tightened. “Running late,” I decided on. “See you in 15 min.”

What came out was this: “Runninlate. See you in 15 Mon.”

…

And so the iPhone made suggestions. Did I want to say Ride? Ripe? Ruin? No. I wanted to say Running. You know, the way a human might. But with its know-it-all suggestions, the iPhone seemed to want to be more human, more helpful, jollier than I was! The vaunted Apple user-friendliness was exposed, before my eyes, as bossiness and insincerity.

I am getting a new BlackBerry sometime in the next fortnight.

UPDATE: On the other hand, iPhones can make you riiiiiich. If you know how to. And I don’t. So, BlackBerry it is.

Malcolm tweets:

I reply:

Malcolm responds via Twitter direct message:

the pitfalls of using a blackberry!

I offer advice:

You should buy an iPhone

Andrew Bolt thought that US President Barack Obama’s gift of 25 DVDs to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a diplomatic faux pas because Brown is blind in one eye, but it was actually a balls-up because the DVDs are encoded with the wrong region code.

It occurred to us recently that the British PM might not even be able to enjoy the thoughtful and luxurious gift of 25 American DVDs given to him by President Obama… Now, just in case they weren’t upset enough already, the British press confirms our worst fears…

Melissa Doyle is a wise speaker of The Truth:

I will never tolerate another negative comment about her again. The woman is an angel.

You are surfing the blogtubes and you come across a post by Scott at GrodsCorp bragging about his brand new aluminium MacBook.

Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?

Do you:

a) Agree with Scott about the magnificence of MacBooks, and Apple products in general, and compliment him on his purchase in comments; or

b) Think that Scott and all Apple devotees are complete tossers, and rip the shit out of him in comments

Choose your own adventure!

Yesterday we chucked my iPhone 3G in a cage with Jeremy’s Blackberry 9000 Bold and told them to fight to the death. Tonight I’m pleased to announce the results of the poll: a thumping 999,948 vote victory to Scott and his iPhone!

The people has spoken

The outcome of the challenge, whereby GrodsReaders asked questions of Scott and Jeremy about their phones, is irrelevant because of the poll landslide.

All hail the iPhone 3G and its owner, Scott The Magnificent.

Let’s get it orrrrrrrrrn!!1!

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for the ultimate showdown: iPhone 3G (as owned by Scott) vs. Blackberry 9000 Bold (as owned by Jeremy). Here’s how the competitors psyched themselves via email yesterday.

Scott: Got an iPhone, by the way…

Jeremy: I’m terribly terribly sorry for your news.

Scott: Your sarcasm doesn’t hide your jealousy.

Jeremy: I could have had one and deliberately chose this instead. (Sent via BlackBerry® from Vodafone)

Scott: Your false sincerity doesn’t hide your jealousy.

Jeremy: Yes, I desperately want a phone locked tight by apple.

Scott: Your false derision doesn’t hide your jealousy.

Jeremy: Your projections of jealousy don’t hide your secret doubts and the sinking feeling you’ve made a horrible, terrible mistake.

Scott: Your attempt to reverse the flow of accusations doesn’t hide your jealousy.

Jeremy: You win this round, gadget.

Scott: Your attempt at conceding defeat doesn’t hide your jealousy.

Jeremy: Your shameless refusal to withdraw from this silly exchange when a dignified exit is handed to you, doesn’t hide your inner torment at realising what an awful mistake you’ve made.

So now it’s over to you, dear GrodsReaders. The Fruit Battle will have two parts: a poll and a challenge.

The Poll

The Challenge
Ask a question of Scott and Jeremy in comments today (e.g. Does your phone have an awesome Apple logo on the back?), and Scott and Jeremy will answer with a “yes” or “no” tomorrow (e.g. Scott: “yes”; Jeremy: “no”). Person with the most positive answers wins.

The following picture could be the logo for the hot new iPhone game from, ahem, “Tapulous”, or it could be a visual representation of the feeling you have, after you have a really messy breakup with someone, when you manage to sleep with their best friend/sister/father/spin instructor:

I’ll leave it up to you to guess which, GrodsReaders. Winner gets a lightly-braised two-headed kitten.

So there I am, frantically searching the Interpipes for a job because this one is starting to shit me no end lately, what with all the extra crap dumped on my desk because someone pisses off without giving due notice. And I’m doubly pissed off because finding a job now is bloody hard since Teh Age sacked most of its hacks and replaced them with redundant ballboys from the Australian Open, so now the job market for journos is flooded with jobseekers who have been Fair-fucked. Anyway I find a vacancy for something called an ‘Online Journalist’, which reads OK and pays slightly more than a week’s shift work at McDonald’s (always a bonus in the lucrative field of journalism). And then I see this line:

Familiarity with C#, Linux, Apache, Perl and Python

And I’m thinking “…unless this is a gig reporting on music performance, Snoopy characters, native Americans and the herpetology scene, I may be under-qualified”. Apparently to be an ‘online journalist’ these days you’ve got to be able to hack into the NASA mainframe and re-task the Hubble telescope to read over Bolta’s shoulder through the window of his suite at Docklands. Being able to research, interview, write, spell, proof, edit and format are optional skillz.

I must be a Luddite.