well… i made an electronic organ today. I’m so proud of it! (well I was when I finished it and it finally WORKED! but since then i’ve been waiting for camera batteries to charge and the excitement has died down a tad). YOu get a bag full of chips and pins and diodes and resistors, you have to figure out what’s what (resistors are a bitch!) then solder each one onto a blank circuit board.. or two. And for a full hour it DIDN’T WORK! fuckety FUCK fuck…

The only thing I’ve soldered in the past is my guitar leads when they’ve split. doing circuit boards is a whole other experience… this is a kit i bought from an electronics store, and it took at least an hour of tracing what wasn’t working to fix all my crap soldering from the day before. Google helped me find awesome soldering advice making this morning’s work much more reliable. what would I have done pre-google? chuck it in the bin i suspect, with nothing to show for it but the smell of burnt hair which Karen smelt when she came over to visit last night.

So this is part of my latest craze project, I’ve gotten some experts from the UK to circuit bend a new 1980s casio MT-40 I’ve bought, and in the meantime I thought I could try bending some of the electronic toys i have lying around. I just needed to practice soldering a bit first, so I bought a couple of kits.

The idea is to get a more crunchy sound happening with my music which is a bit too acoustic and soft for me at the moment. And while i’ve been sick has been the perfect time to sit and do projects like clean out my hard drive and soldering. Now if only I can get my neighbour to stop banging around like a maniac, so I can get some rest.

This whole thing makes me feel like I should get a teeshirt to show off my geek powers! actually speaking of tee shirts I made a couple for the sci-fi convention next month which I am hitting with ma girls, I’ve always wanted to do a sci fi convention with girls. we’re all convention virgins. We’ve had teeshirts made… mine says K-9 shits ball-bearings which he does. Tom Baker said so. I also made one I used to want to wear till Tennant pissed me off. But Kerri wants it.

Hope you all have a lovely Easter break!

so last year, 08-09 holidays i spent the summer with an atlas learning the countries of the world. My geography is pretty bad and I thought if I had to waste my time on something perhaps it could be something useful. I also figured there’d be iPhone applications that would help me do it too (not as many as I’d hoped, but anyway).

So this summer I picked up the habit again, I went to Borders for the Boxing day sales and bought myself a full priced atlas with nice clear political maps and things and have been slowly teaching myself the capital cities of Europe… didn’t get too far.

Anyway each day for a week i’ve been testing myself on Traveller IQ and finally I completed the 12th level! So I must be improving… even if i’m only jabbing at countries and hoping I don’t get too many russian cities on the east coast!

Alan Alda was interviewed by Denton on Elders recently, and one of the things he reminded me of was that Humans are a baby species, we’ve been around 10,000 years and compared to most other species who’ve been around millions of years we really are a speck in time.

When we talk about the future of the Human Race we get all defeatist and think about nuclear wars and climate change and so on. Admittedly Nuclear war would pretty well fuck us, the few people that would survive wouldn’t have many resources to rebuild, the Earth would be contaminated… it’d be a lot worse than Noah’s floods.

But climate change… well you know ‘The end of life as we know it’ …yes. But that’s not saying much. ‘Life as we know it’ has supermarkets, cars, economics and a whole bunch of other things probably not vital to the survival of the species. Enough people could survive with enough resources that humans would bounce back. We’ve survived Ice Ages before, it wiped out the majority of the worlds humanish population, but humans are resourceful and can survive such disaster. Clothing, fire, scaring the crap out of bears and stealing their caves.

Not to survive intact, not to bring our cars and credit cards with us, probably not to get to colonise Mars any time soon… I think we’re a long way off those kinds of sci-fi dreams. Realistically we probably need to learn to survive as a species before we ascend as beings…

Think about it though… Humans, resourceful Humans… where will they be a thousand years from now, a hundred thousand years from now, a million years from now?

Often I find myself disappointed with the 21st century (aka The Future). No flying cars, no female Prime Minister, no dinner in pill-form.

But then you buy a Penguin Classic of the first Bond novel from 1953, and realise holy shit, maybe we’ve come further than i realise, and i quote:

“This was just what he had been afraid of. These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men. And now for this to happen to him, just when the job had come off so beautifully. For Vesper to fall for an old trick like that and get herself snatched and probably held to ransom like some bloody heroine in a strip cartoon. The silly bitch.”

Yuh huh… a popular classic eh Penguin? Right up there with Pride and Prejudice or Of Mice and Men. It’s a pretty crap book for any one who’s curious. The movie was way better.

I’ve been trying to learn about why, REALLY why we have the parallel import ban in our copyright law, and why it’s going to be destroyed in three years time. Basically we’re talking about allowing cheaper U.S. books into the country, and the hope is that books will become cheaper in Australian bookstores.

But there are lots, and lots, and lots of articles which make this issue about as clear as mud, it’s all propaganda and no-one seems to talk in facts… so I am beginning a little research project on it myself.

here are some salient points:

Currently Australian publishers buy a licence to publish a big popular book within Australia.

Like Harry Potter, there would have been a bidding war between publishers competing to own the rights to publish the British books here. But this also happens for Australian books.

This is much like the record industry, where all these sleazy A&R guys would go to see hot fresh young acts and try to wine and dine them onto their record label. Australian bands would find three or four major labels competing for their record deal. Australian bands like Frente!, the Lucksmiths, Custard etc wouldn’t have had a chance of getting a record deal overseas until they’d gotten one here and really proved they could do the ‘hard yards’. It is very rare for an Australian band to get signed overseas first, if they do it’s because they moved there.

Parallel imports of a British or American printing of Harry Potter is currently illegal according to Australia’s copyright law.

The Australian publisher paid HEAPS of money for the right to sell to our market, so we can’t have every Tom, Dick and Harry muscling in on the licence they paid good money for. Parallel imports will become legal in three years. No more local licences.

This could be good in that Publishers will no longer pay exorbitant prices for the right to publish and sell books like Harry Potter, which probably helped push the price up of said books. But Publishers make the majority of their money on those big titles, which helps support the company well enough that they can get their own original (Australian) titles out on the market. Now, Australian publishers will have to rely only on the proceeds of Australian books sold. And that’s not enough to keep the publishers afloat – bye bye local publishing industry.

Australian writers will have to compete on a world market to find a Publisher that will take them on.

Australian Publishers wont be able to take the risk of publishing new unheard of Aussie writers, these new writers will have to go out into the world on their own – imagine Frente! in their early days, trying to get their first CD out, they’ve had good local shows, they have a small loyal following, but to get a record deal, all the small label are gone, and the big labels aren’t interested in the risk – they’d have to go overseas to find a record deal. This is a slight exaggeration. In fact there will be very small publishers who will carry Australian material, and hopefully with subsisidies bigger Aussie publishers will take on a few new Authors along with best sellers like Tim Winton. But the whole industry will be much leaner, much more wary of risk taking. It’ll be like going from an acre of large rambling gardens with all kinds of things sprouting up all the time, to a handful of potted plants on the balcony.

Meanwhile UK and US publishers will be able to sell us their prints, shipped in direct.

Amazon.com was hurting before, now the wound will be gaping. The US market is the biggest so you can guarantee that most of the books we get will be American and won’t be printed especially for us, it’ll be the stock they already have – in American English, promoted to an American Audience, about American things. Stuff Americans want to read. It’ll be like Hollywood in Books. Compared to a piddling little Australian Industry that will rely heavily on Government subsidy, where before the government didn’t need to pay anything to keep publishers publishing our stuff.

Will the books get cheaper?

I don’t know. If it did it’d be a matter of a few dollars off a novel, and maybe $10 maybe $20 off a $100 book. We’ve already been through this with CD’s, in 1998 they said CD’s would get cheaper – did you even notice?

The only thing that ever made CD’s cheaper was in 1995(?) when the independent distributor Shock Records refused to get in with the big boys who had agreed with each other they’d all hike up the prices to $30. Shock put theirs down to $22. Nothing to do with parallel imports. Big Business absorbed the price difference there.

People are so quick to say how cheap US books are, but their country has a much bigger domestic consumer market, and the books don’t have to travel that far. Once you add shipping to Australia, advertising, and the cost of distribution around the country (which is probably what Australian publishers will be reduced to – distributors), any price difference wont be that marked. UK books aren’t actually cheap to start with. It’s more likely that any savings consumers could see will be absorbed by the publishing and distributing companies.

Does it matter? I buy all my books from the U.S. anyway.

I’ve heard a lot of people say they buy their books on Amazon, but the reality is that they only do that when our dollar is strong. The rest of the time they don’t buy books at all. This tide will effect us on ALL our books in future, not just the ones we buy on the internet. I know I don’t read Australian fiction at all, but I also know that our cultural identity is built from books about us. Not books about slavery in America’s south.

In the end we probably wont notice a big change, but the industry will, Australian works will be sidelined, the industry will not be as robust as it currently is: From lush rambling acreage, to miserly potted plants. This has all happened to the music industry in 1998, I remember avidly waiting for the legislation to change, even holding off on buying CDs in the expectation there might be a change. Zip Nada. Zilch. So again I urge you to not decide thinking about your wallets when, the reality is CD prices are as artificial as the price of oil barrels. If book prices are equally artificial, then this is just a legislation to attack Australian writers, it seems to achieve nothing else.

I am going to keep researching, see what I can learn.

EDIT:
As promised I researched further and asked around with acquaintances who have experience in the publishing industry, some salient points i’ve learnt were

* there isn’t much fat to cut from book prices as is, so prices wont go down noticeably
* amazon.com is cheaper because it’s an online book store, it doesn’t have to pay rent for stores and staff and interior decoration across the country/world
* Australian publishers are already very market driven, and don’t support aussie writers for the sake of it. it’s all about money
* freight costs to Australia are really high, which pushes prices up but also keeps the trash out, it’s too expensive to turn us into a dumping ground, only what WILL sell will make it here.
* and print is dying, go buy a kindle.

Essentially this shows almost nothing will change, except that Aussie writers will have to swim in a bigger international ocean for publishers… subsidies for publishing original Australian content, particularly fiction should be encouraged, just as it is for film, theatre, art etc… So the real question is, is the Rudd government’s recent suggestion of providing $1.40 per Australian book to publishers enough to protect our writers?

There’s so much going on in the world that sometimes I feel like I’m living in a sci-fi novel. There’s Meth Lab Contaminated Houses a problem that is spreading fast across America, or there’s the Bride throwing bouquet causes plane to crash (though mostly it just reminds me why spending $50k on a wedding day is not a good plan). and then there’s this iPhone app Grindr which Stephen Fry recommended on Top Gear, for showing you the nearest gay guy with an iPhone (lets be honest, how many gay guys DON’T have iPhones?).

I sometimes wonder how i can NOT be writing a sci fi novel right now.

Alain de Botton recently spat the dummy over a very important review of his latest book. Only his coments turned out to be not as private as he’d hoped, and now everyone vaguely interested is glued wide-eyed to the fallout.

Everyone has been in this position at some point in their life, and it will get worse due to the fact that people are expected to share their facebook with all their co-workers/bosses/partners/ex-partners/children/parents.

Previously the internet had been a place where you could create an image of who you were, not necessarily fake, but controlled, the way we don’t put bad photos of ourselves online. This was no different to real life where you choose what you say at work, or to certain friends – you don’t confide everything with them.

Now the line is blurred and we are expected to share everything. our closest confidants we may be communicating to through our blog posts or tweets, rather than the recently devalued (though much more private) email or phone call. We may say in our FB status “god i’m bored, i really hate this job” and some old friend who knows one of your co-workers could pass this along until your boss hears it and you’re hauled into their office ‘for a chat’.

The astonishing thing isn’t that people in the public eye are being caught in this trap. In the past there was a brick wall between the vaguely famous and the public, but the supposed power of the grapevine has drawn many out from that cover, pulled them off their pedestal to a degree, so they’re in the same mess we’re in. The astonishing thing is that Alain de Botton hasn’t written a book about it yet: The erasing of the public and private persona… what is left of us?

You can find my twitter at: http://twitter.com/lushr
(atleast I have more control there, than on facebook of this persona)

SO much going on! but my becoming more and more wary about privacy makes it harder to post. The fact that i cant go out anymore without someone snapping a horrible photo and putting it online and linking it to my ‘online profile’ without ever once consulting me, makes me wish i had gone down the path my best friend took of never uploading images of herself online or ever using her real name, or ever letting herself be photographed… a quick google of me will show you that indeed after 14 years of being highly active online i do indeed exist digitally and now what was once a joyous thing of a truly unique name, has become a curse.

but enough of that.

i have my left hand in a cast – from a simple fall. i am left handed. hence possibly poor sentence construction, typing and punctuation. the cast comes off queen’s b’day weekend, fortunate since that’s the week I head to Canberra to stalk a librarian and reacquaint with my birthplace, then flap my way up to Brisvegas to stay in gorgeous apartments (i wont link them in case you have horror stories to tell) and hang out with my bestest buddy and generally unwind.

and why would a girl like me need to unwind, you ask? well i’ve been doing two jobs since March – full time in my dream role of running a library website as well as liaising as Science Librarian. while doing my backup dream job of teaching at university. i must say it’s all a bit overwhelming with both jobs quite new, one arm and 16 assignments to mark!

but i’ve been taking the time to reflect just how i got here. from unemployed, hopeless, struggling with a direction, health threatening to pack in on me, to having a decent job that pays well and possibly even a career path. the answer is luck and parents who let me study in their house again. i feel i can no longer wear the title of ’slacker’. not that I ever did, i just felt deep down that I identified with the cynical generation x, and that that was where I would always belong in society. yet society has won. i fill a grown up role.

This isn’t really a problem for me, this has been a gradual change over the last 5 years. My only gripe is how time-poor I have become. plus the fractured wrist doesn’t help much with the creative endeavours… i have a lot more cash to spend on other’s creative endeavours though. and since I got a car last month (again the greenie within withers a little) i am able to listen to new music on the radio and learn that Ratatat and the YYYs both have new albums. And maybe even explore new stuff if i find time to get to Polyester and listen to Au Revoir Simone at length.

The car (second hand & fuel efficient) is amazing, i get a lot more done with the little time that is mine. I feel the conversion will be complete when my RRR-FM sticker arrives in the mail and gets slapped on my rear window proudly. I was able to fossick for shoes that are comfortable, jeans that fit, and discover after 15 long years the elusive long sleeve under shirt in a variety of colours, all due to my ability to travel from one shopping hive to another.

My newest obsession, is tied with my job: pop science books. I have now “The World Without Us” to read about how the earth would change if all humans disappeared today. In fact I have been lusting over about 15 of these books and borrowed another five that I have no time to read – hell i’m still stuck on page 30 of the latest Jasper Fforde (why is the cover so ugly?? and actally it seems he’s got a newer one out now “Shades of Grey”) i keep falling asleep after a couple of pages. This is what separation from public transport does to you.

These are some of the titles that caught my eye while fossicking the shopping hives:

 
[i've taken to taking photos of books with my cancermaker, so i can research later, since there are far too many to buy on the spot]

And before the next paragraph which many of you will resent me for and will give you that one final reason to quickly delete my feed, (at the very least for the overly long post!) I’ll tell you that I got a full legal copy of Adobe Master Collection CS3 thru work, extremely cheap, which makes my inner geek soar with delight – this blog is definitely due for a revamp this year! Don’t mention CS4 I’ll only snub you!

My final recent life revelation is that I have become a stricter vegetarian again after watching McLibel (by the way i’m not buying anything from amazon, just linking for convenience) and there was this section in which I watched cows and chickens being electrocuted, gassed, skinned, hung, burnt, and tossed away like so much garbage. It reminded me why I’m vegetarian, why i have been for 18 years – because I choose not to participate in such activities on a daily basis. While the rest of the world shuts their eyes and says “I don’t want to know”, they choose for this to continue to happen, they make it happen. And the next time I’m asked why I am vegetarian that will be my answer, not the palliatives I’ve been giving to make people feel comfortable around me, and comfortable with what they’re doing, yet they cannot bear to look at it, discuss it, or admit it.

i need things to read.

i’ve just finished tidying everything i own, everything, even my wardrobe now has all the short sleeves together, dresses together etc… the box of school stuff is gone, there is an empty box ready for whatever the new year brings, the sewing things are all tidied away.

but there’s this one piece of paper, my friend ROmany was recommending books for me to read, and i just don’t know where to put it so i don’t lose it. then i realised: my blog!

Romany Recommends:

• everything bad is good for you
• how to build a time machine
• barefoot investor
• jennifer government

actually some of those may be other recomendations sneaking onto the list.

Now what have you guys got to recommend to me?

I have had so many people invite me to do meme’s lately. And these meme’s are not like normal memes, these meme’s are not about fluffy bunnies, or guessing how many presents you’ll get this Christmas, these memes are about “getting to know me better”.

Except, it’s not just mates who are getting to know me better, it’s Credit Card Fraudsters and Identity Stealers.

Think about it.

by Zadi Diaz Some rights reserved

this meme shows people your handwriting, your favourite letters (which probably have fancy quirks) whether you’re left or right handed… the “16 things” meme on Flickr gets you to post a picture of yourself and list 16 things about yourself, on Facebook it’s “25 things”. In this you might inadvertently mention you’re married, the town you live in, how many kids and pets you have and their names (these are common passwords), where you were born, and any unusual traits about yourself. You might be careful not to mention these things in your Facebook profile, or in your blog to prevent stalkers. But a meme seems to be the magical key that unlocks all doors.

If you’re still unconvinced, there’s the “What’s your pornstar name?” meme. Your first name would be the name of your first pet and your surname would be the name of your first street. Innocuous, yeah? Mine would be Pushkin Summerland. Awesome porn name! except that i’ve just told you the answer to two security questions that might be used to protect my webmail password, which inturn protects my paypal password, netbank password and all social site passwords.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Okay, i’ll tell you:

More metadata than information…. why would anyone in their right mind want and RSS feed that gives you half a paragraph and then you have to click to the site to read the rest?? the whole POINT of an RSS feed is that i don’t have to go anywhere!

And WHY OH WHY are there always two links above every bleeding feed entry – i have to think about which one to click before clicking, i can’t think why anyone would WANT to click to the raw feed.

And what’s with all the ugly “share it” buttons?! i don’t want to bleeding share it until i want to bleeding read it first!!!

This is the fault of developers… we get very little control over how our RSS feeds present themselves. any control we DO have it’s to add more junk that isn’t actually content.

And if i were famous and anyone actually READ my blog, someone might actually do something, but nobody will. we’ll be stuck with this another five years as the buttons and tags and other ephemera build up at the bottom of every feed entry until we all give up and start writing letters long hand and licking post stamps again.

Just going through my bookmarks, cleaning out some rubbish and i found one I thought i’d long lost about future screen technology.

We may not be as far off as you think in creating some of the technologies you see above, watches like this are already on the market and you can see a sony version of the bendable prototype on the right being presented on YouTube.

This stuff fascinates me because we’re talking about the kind of technology so portable you can wear it, as powerful as your laptop but far more versatile. I’ve been extremely well behaved in not annoying you with more tales of the iPhone (aka the cancermaker), but having that device has changed aspects of my life greatly, particularly getting train timetables, maps and looking up library catalogues while i walk down the street to wherever I need to be.

Look at that luminescent newspaper! I know plastic is about to become as rare as bakelite as oil reserves run dry, (mmm bakelite… how i miss thee!) but still, one pliable sheet that carries your newspaper within would save innumerable trees and obviously help with a massive waste problem. The best bit about it is that it doesn’t look all scrunched up like a website, it’s a proper layout any graphic designer would be proud of! Actually, I lie, the best bit is how it looks like something straight out of Minority Report. Imagine reading books this way too? i know there’s a lot of books I’d want physical copies of, just for the smell of them, the feel of them, but i’d happily trade that sheet of plastic for all the heavy library text books i’ve been lugging to and from home.

… gone are my imaginings of steampunk!

I didn’t know there was a Google browser till yesterday and the article i read about it talked like Google were the second coming:

‘Chrome is open-source, meaning that its code is available to everyone for inspection or improvement — even to its rivals. That’s a huge, promising twist that ought to shut up the conspiracy theorists.’

If you know me, you’ll know i scoffed at this. Why would a company make a browser? especially when there’s already a good open source one available? There’s always an ulterior motive.

I imagined how they’d eventually use it to extend their empire – they already save and collate everything we search for, everything we email each other and they already catalogue the web with the intents and purposes of making their search engine an A.I. (They’ve stated this themselves).

I thought ‘Gee, wouldn’t they love it if they could watch everything you do via your browser, they can’t get away with that while it’s open source, but I bet they’ll do it eventually!’

Boy was I wrong! A story that came out the same day but i missed (Thanks Mel) says that Google intends to do just that, AND they want copyright on anything you type? (does this include my passwords Google?)

‘Users who downloaded the free browser yesterday were asked to agree to a clause that gave Google a “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly, perform, publicly display and distribute” any information they typed into a website. Part of the same clause allowed Google to share the information with “other companies, organisations or individuals with whom Google has relationships”.’

After massive uproar, the copyright clause was removed, but the ability to monitor everything you type into a website stays. They can and will store anything you enter via their browser (passwords!?) for their own ends.

Basically they have just made a move to own the web. This is the company that the NY Times heralds as the Second Coming. Lets just remember that Microsoft was the First Coming.

I’ve removed all Google cookies from my computer and banned them from being put back on. If you have Gmail, get rid of it. You’ve been warned. If you save water, if you recycle, then you should go to some lengths to protect human knowledge while you’re at it.

If you honestly think i’m exaggerating or overreacting, go see what AT&T think

Yes i have a video log for you! I thought the iphone deserved a video log all it’s own. This is a review of the phone itself, positives and negatives, a bit about the different apps i’ve gotten, especially the music sequencer Beatmaker as well as my experience with Optus.

I failed to mention that the reason i got a white phone was because fingerprints are less visible on it, and my sock cover is used to wipe the screen every so often. Also the 16gb are very handy, already i’ve got 5gb on there and that’s with a small selection of music and only 4 or 5 new applications from the iTunes store.

For the curious, i’m on the $59 plan with $7 phone repayments for two years ($66 per month). This includes 500mb of data, $350 worth of calls (at 40c/30sec) each month, free access to Optus wifi hotspots (such as the State Library and Gloria Jeans *puke*). Also because i signed up before Aug 31st I should be eligible for the unlimited data the first month.

For the skeptical, yes i’m aware that this is basically a big massive ad for a commercial product. Essentially I believe in supporting Apple in the iPhone endeavour because the phones that Motorola and Nokia have been delivering to us for the last 8 years is pathetic. The technology developments are extremely slow and over priced. The iPhone is a MASSIVE leap in usability (which is my pet issue – phones should be EASY to use, not painful) though they too are now playing hte game of ‘trickling out the technology developments’ by not improving the camera, including video etc. But I cant wait two years, and if Apple drop the ball then, I’ll go to one of the competitors who will by then have caught on that mobile phones have evolved.

Already many of my friends will notice i’m contacting them more, smsing, emailing, sending pictures, becuse it is SO much easier now, it’s actually fun.

bold are ones i’ve read
italic are ones i tried to read and failed

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

According to the domestic media, at least four people have been killed [taking diet pills] and 158 others have liver and thyroid disorders as a result of consuming such products in the past 2 years. A government-funded study found that 5% of children in Tokyo junior schools have anorexia nervosa, whereas reports of eating disorders have risen ten-fold since 1980. The leader of the research team, Gen Komaki, of Japan’s National Institute of Mental Health, estimates that 47% of Japanese women are more than 10% under their ideal weight.

Jonathan Watts, The Lancet, Volume 360, Issue 9329, 27 July 2002, Page 318

healthy my ass…

for those that know me, look what i found Anarchist Librarians – the revolution will be catalogued blog!

also i was perusing the State Library vaults of journals the other day and there were HEAPS of political periodicals, it was hilarious, i was in heaven, but it wasn’t what i was looking for so i was trying to ignore them all – but one of them The Anarchist Age poked out at me and what i loved was this weekly Anarchist Q&A they have, stuff like:
“What is Anarchy?”
“What would an anarchist city look like?”
“What role does consumerism play in an anarchist society?”
and they’re just great answers, really simple, straight-forward, easy-to-read, unbiased informative answers that are designed to get you to think. I wish i could just get those Q&As in RSS feed to my blog each week… *pout*

(sorry for quick succession of posts… atleast it’s not one big long evil post!)

http://drawn.ca/2007/05/06/the-web-is-using-us/

This article highlights this amazing YouTube video about the difference between ‘text’ ‘hypertext’ and ‘xml’. it’s done in such an empowering and invigorating way that i can watch it over and over again. And continue to get great ideas from it.

Rupert Murdoch owns myspace… he paid around 580m for it two years ago.

how is it that boys get to be geeks and boffins,
but girls have to be fangirls and groupies?

and isn’t it interesting that the latter two titles suggest an obsession with sex?

sounds like wishful thinking to me.