stupendous.net

You may have drifted over here via an older post, Fuck the god of war. It seems as if the original excerpt is part of Howard Bloom’s work. Here’s a longer excerpt of it; I’m sure it’s not the original but I’ll keep digging.

I wrote this as a post on Mactalk but friends I’ve linked the article to don’t have an account there and can’t be bothered to make one. So here it is. It was a reply to someone mentioning the new Star Wars MMO.

I’ll be excited if they release a Mac client for it.

Otherwise, it’ll join the long list of MMOs that I’ll never bother to boot into Windows to play.

^ Oh man. See, that’s what I automatically typed. I now have to edit this post and correct myself because even now, I find the idea of immersing myself in a fantasy world incredibly attractive.

You can never understand any obsession without being obsessed*. Be glad you’ve dodged that bullet, and if you’re smart, you’ll dodge this one too.

MMOs are a complete waste of time. The objective is to waste time and have fun, sure, but what you are actually doing is training your mind to do things that are completely useless outside the context of that game, to the exclusion of anything else.

Unless you can limit your MMO gaming to a similar level to other ‘fun waste of time’ activities, it will eventually eat up all your spare time, energy and mental bandwidth until you are nothing but an empty shell that exists only to earn enough money so you can pay your subscription fee.

Save yourself. Don’t waste your life with any MMO. MMOs are gateway drugs to themselves. It starts small, a few hours here, a few hours there. Before you know it, you’re getting cranky if you don’t get your daily fix.

*Hi. My name is chrome. I’m a WoW addict. I’ve been WoW free for 6 months now. My last session only lasted 12 hours, and before that I hadn’t touched WoW for 3 months. I still maintain my subscription, but I soon hope to gain enough strength to log on, delete my characters, and cancel my account.

Ben Elthm at newmatilda.com asks, Is There a Recession Brewing in Our Housing Bubble?

It has some fairly serious implications for those of us who don’t own a home but are looking a buying. I’ve personally been staying out of the property market in Sydney because of the huge unaffordability of it. What Ben’s saying seems to be validating that choice.

Lets go over a few key points of his piece:

Surprise, surprise: it turns out that this was not a good thing. The Australian colonies’ unregulated banking system produced a property bust and banking crisis that looks eerily familiar in our own time. As land prices plummeted, borrowers defaulted, taking banks and building societies down with them.

Here, Ben is referring to the land boom of the 1880’s in Melbourne. The important thing to note here is that when land prices plummet, borrowers default, which causes Banks to take a loss on the loans. Enough losses and the Banks become insolvent.

As I have remarked here many times before, Australian house prices are highly over-valued. In 2007, house prices in cities like Sydney and Perth briefly reached an astonishing nine times median incomes — among the most over-valued in the entire world.

And we know this. Anyone who has actually gone out to look at properties knows how overvalued they are. I looked at an apartment building on the weekend and the quality of the fittings in the apartments was horrible; the absolute cheapest fittings they could find. If you look at buildings made more than 10 years ago, you can see that things were of a much higher standard. $400k for a 1br apartment in Mascot? Ugh. Horrible.

The result of this asset price bubble has been unsustainable levels of household debt. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s household finance statistics tell us that Australian households now hold debts equal to 160 per cent of disposable income — higher even than in the US. Unsurprisingly, RBA Governor Glenn Stevens thinks that consumers may be reaching their borrowing limits. This huge debt burden is one reason why house prices must fall, and soon. Like their US counterparts, Australian households simply can’t keep borrowing and spending indefinitely. Inevitably, balance sheets must be repaired as consumers begin to save again. In the long-term, this is a good thing. But in the short-term, this means much lower consumer spending — something that Gerry Harvey says we’re already seeing.

So due to the large debt burden, house prices must fall. And when they fall, there will be defaults. More defaults mean more house prices on the market, which means house prices will fall further.

One argument popular among real estate analysts is that there is a still a significant lack of housing supply, which means prices shouldn’t fall too much. There is some validity in this point — Australia built far fewer houses during its property boom than the US did. But even a shortage of properties won’t stop house prices declining rapidly if demand drops off a cliff. And if home owners default, foreclosure sales will depress house prices. A vicious cycle can ensue, as the US experience demonstrates.

Real estate analysts like to argue these things because they themselves are up to their necks in it. These guys will say anything it takes to try and keep the bubble going. But as we all know, bubbles burst eventually. This one is no different, and its on it’s way out, in a big and nasty way.

No wonder the housing industry is “pessimistic”. Perhaps we should all be.

If you’ve managed to live within your means, and save a little, in the next year or so once the dust begins to settle, you might be able to leverage those savings into a cheap house purchase. At least, thats my hope.

Seeing as I have no skin in the game, I’m optimistic.

… and even though everything Peter predicted has come true, there are STILL people ignoring him.

Watch Peter Schiff from Euro Pacific Capital as he schools Art Laffer on the economy:

Check out some of the other videos from Peter Schiff. This guy was an advisor to Ron Paul during his run for the Republican nomination. He’s not looking quite so crazy now, is he?

Its really interesting how desperate people are when they’re trying to defend a bubble right before it bursts. They will say ANYTHING to prove that the bubble will keep going.

Bubbles always burst. Thats what bubbles do. The housing bubble in Australia will surely burst like it has in the US; houses cannot stay this unaffordable for much longer.

I’m hanging onto my savings for now, at least.

Released a minor update to NodeQuota.

Internode have changed the URL for grabbing the usage data from, and require an update to all meters to use the new URL. 1.0.7 implements this change, and if you don’t upgrade to 1.0.7, NodeQuota will stop working when Internode shut down the old URL this month.

So, I reverted back to Wordpress. I didn’t make many posts using Movable Type, but will try to import them at some point. I might not bother.

The main reason for switching back to Wordpress? There are a few things, really.

• Themes

  The themes available for MT are quite limited these days. Most people seem to be working on Wordpress themes. And I think there is a good reason for this; the templating language used in the Movable Type theme engine is … antiquated. I’m sure it made sense back in the day, but Wordpress’s templates are much easier to write. Try writing an if/then/else structure in a template in Movable Type and then do it with Wordpress, I dare you.

• Application speed.

  Movable type generates everything out to flat files. It’s supposed to be able to dynamically generate some content, but in practice it doesn’t work very well. And many changes will require you to regenerate every page on the site. Its not cool.

I do like the fact that Movable Type will let you manage multiple sites through a single instance; Wordpress really needs this feature I think to cater for the smaller numbers of people out there with multiple domains who want to run different blogs for different topics but keep the same user database.

In other news, I’ve started cycling to work and home. Today is my 5th day, and my bottom is beginning to hurt in spite of the padded shorts. Ow. But, the good news is I am feeling a little better for it and its encouraging me to get up earlier in the morning - none of which is a bad thing.

If I manage to burn ~500 calories a day, which should be easily achievable with my hilly 8km (16km in total per day) route, and keep my calorie intake down, I should be able to get into a healthy deficit and burn some of the padding around the middle.

This fixes a few embarrassing oopses and implements keychain access for storing your passwords. This hopefully stabilises the 1.0.x tree and I can now start working on 1.1.

Changelog

• Fixed the Updates preference panel.

• Switched to using the Keychain to store your password. Secure! NodeQuota will automatically migrate your password from the insecure preferences file to Keychain. You will need to allow Keychain access to NodeQuota’s key for this to work.

• Automatically initiates an update when closing preferences.

• Provides feedback when changing the display preferences. The traffic light will change colour dynamically as you set the thresholds.

Planned features for 1.1

• Internode quota usage history graphs.

  I am going to try to load these into the menu directly much like iStat menus. I am going to try and beg for iSlayers classes for doing this if not, I’ll try and engineer it myself, it will just take longer.

• SNMP Graphing of your router’s interfaces along with totals to show up-to-the-minute accurate information about your quota.

  Same deal; I want live graphs of the SNMP data in the menubar (as part of the dropdown). I would overlay the live data with the data supplied by Internode’s accounts server, so people could see the differences and spot any discrepancies.

• Multiple accounts.

  I have not decided what to do here. Many people have asked if I can provide a NodeQuota for other providers. I’m thinking that adding to the multiple account support, I could also have multiple providers. I am planning to split out the actual data gathering code separately anyway, so this might not be so hard. If people would like to see NodeQuota support other providers then it might be worth doing.

1.0 is essentially finished as it meets my basic requirements for a usage meter. If you have anything else you would wish to see in NodeQuota, please post to it’s project page .

I’ve finally had some time this weekend to work on some issues people raised and to improve some bits of the code.

Version 1.0.5:

• Integrated the Sparkle Framework. This framework provides an easy method for Cocoa applications to automatically update.

• Fixed Cut & Paste shortcuts in the Username and Password fields in the preferences panel.

• When opening the preferences or about windows, NodeQuota will now make sure that the windows are in front. These windows may also be closed via the keyboard shortcut, Command-W.

• The output items in the menu now have tooltips explaining each of the values, to reduce confusion. As a side effect, the menus down highlight while you hover over them, but they do nothing if selected. I will probably replace these items with a custom view at some point, when I work out how to do it.

• The preferences panel has been completely redesigned, to allow for future growth. There is now a preference to change the warning thresholds for the traffic light icon, along with options to change the automatic update settings.

• NodeQuota now uses HTTPS to communicate with the Internode usage server.

Go grab it from here: NodeQuota 1.0.5.

So I was looking at the API for writing blog clients a week back with the intention of writing an iPhone wordpress app.

They beat me!

Just goes to show how great an idea it is. All my best ideas are done by other people.

Buggy as hell though. Crashed often while adding photos.