Sam's Insane Ravings

Someone reported a group of Aboriginal Muslim extremists to the wonderful new National Security Hotline. Claiming they were going to blow stuff up with petrol bombs. For reasons I don't understand this wasn't instantly flagged as a hoax, and the police wasted some time and effort on it. Mr. Clinch is probably going to be in a little bit of trouble over that.

The prosecutor, Sergeant Eric Gooch, said Clinch told the call centre his name was Denzel Clinch, from Queensland. He claimed Alden Clinch and a group of Aboriginal Muslim youths would explode jerry cans of petrol some time that night.

SMH article

He called the hotline and dobbed himself in as a terrorist. That doesn't indicate a massive amount of common sense to me. And yet the police needed to raid seven homes in order to find him...

Mr Williams said Clinch's actions had resulted in a "very expensive exercise" in ascertaining first that it was a hoax and then identifying the offender.

SMH article

He used a false name with the same last name as his real name. And gave his own name as one of the terrorists. That results in a very expensive exercise, and a seven home raiding train... Perth police are good at their jobs, obviously.

Another option is that he didn't dob himself in, and the SMH article has got some wires crossed. Or the police prosecutor has. In that case we run into a more concerning issue (which I'm sure will crop up soon enough anyway). The National Security Hotline states that callers can, if they wish, remain anonymous.

A hoaxer with a brain cell wouldn't identify themselves as the terrorist... I wonder how long it would take for the powers that be to get around that anonymous bit and kick down a few doors. After all this was set up by the government that tried its best to give ASIO the power to detain people who might have information (ie. non-suspects) for extended periods without notification. Making a call to the hotline would put one into the might have information category, at least the Labor party found a brain cell between them and blocked that bill.

Phoenix is so much better than mozilla it's just not funny.

CSS needs a TK style packing layout option.

Honestly, is it that hard to avoid a sunken ship. It sunk 3 weeks ago, you'd think they'd salvage the wreck, or mark its location somehow...

Oops.

A handful of new year's photos have been added to the photos section.

The first thing I'll do when my world conquest starts and I make peace treaty with some tiny island is get a .int domain.

The wonderful intersection where George St and Broadway meet next to the bus stop, and central station, has had an extra line painted.

Previously when coming driving from hime to uni (or the western suburbs) you it was great fun. In the right lane, when going straight through the intersection heading along broadway to uni the two roads didn't quite line up. So you ended up seemingly heading into the oncoming traffic. It was great fun.

In the lane next to the right lane you would drive straight through knowing you would hit your lane when you reached the otherside. Of course often enough some clown in the right lane doesn't know the intersection and beeps you since to them it looks like you are drifting into their lane and forcing them into oncoming traffic. They'd slow down, and end up stradling the two lanes at the other end, at which point I can only assume they felt like an idiot for honking at someone while they themselves where drifting into that person's lane.

Now there's a big dotted line right through the intersection, showing people where the lanes are. Which takes away all my fun of either heading towards the oncoming traffic, or seemingly forcing others to do so...

I guess my source of fun, was probably also the source of a few smashes, when you got two idiots in the two lanes...

I made some internal changes to the code behind this site