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I noticed this funny advertisement on the web today. (Actually on my own blog)

Looks like an ad for a candidate in the Australian Federal Election. But whats so funny about it?

Well, the election was last weekend and I’m still getting ads telling me who I should vote for.

Looks like someone forgot to cancel the ads, didn’t put the right end date on their campaign, or have money left in their AdWords accounts so just left it to run out.What ever the reason it looks a little silly.

Looking at the Aliens vs Predator: Requiem site tonight it was interesting to see that there are three types of English: North American, Outside North American, and Australian.

So what is the difference? Should we feel privileged, or outcasts?

Examining the different English options I found the major difference for the ‘English Australia‘ sub site is the addition of an intermediary age verification page.

I presume that has to do with some legislation in Australia that prohibits access to R rated sites for minors. Hence you need to verify your age.

The thing that annoys me though is: If you are going to do a site specific for Australia you might like to get the date format correct on the age verification form.

Australia uses the international date format day/month/year.

Building Lego ducks for my child I ran out of appropriate blocks. Desperate to complete the project, as any Lego mad scientist would do, I chose to opt for a hybrid animal.

Using pieces from the farm set, cow genes were combined with the existing duck, resulting in the transgenic (cow)duck.

But how far should one take playing God?
Is it ethical to create GMO Lego?
And are we warping our children’s imagination?

In related news:
(of a more serious nature)

• GM canola gets go-ahead in NSW and Vic (SMH, 27 Nov 2007)

Came across this parody of the writers strike in the USA. Would the Internet survive if bloggers stopped? What would people do with all that time they spend blogging and reading other people’s blogs?

(see YouTube movie below the fold)

(more…)

There is a law that electronic advertising for elections in Australia must cease 3 days before the election, the last TV ads ran last night, but this law doesn’t apply to the internet. So expect to see lots of adverts on your favourite news and social sites.

For example, off at the Sydney Morning Herald you get to see lots of Flash driven political advertising. Like this Flash version of the interest rate fud ad. Saying ‘interest rates have risen to more than 10%’ for each previous Labor government.

I’m interested to know where they got their figures. I though by the time Keating was in the rates were on the way down. If you look at the graph on this site, or even the figures from the RBA site, you can see that 12% was on the way down.

Ok, they may have gone back up to 10.2% during the ‘recession we had to have‘, but not 12%.

On another note it is interesting to see that both the Liberals and the Greens got in trouble for forgetting to put the name and address of the authorising agent on their Facebook ads. The Greens have fixed the problem, but the Liberal party just pulled the ads.

While talking about social networks it is nice so see that the Federal Election ‘07 flickr group I setup now has 111 photos. Few of these are from the Liberal party, most being from Labor, the Greens and other minor groups. I did go looking for photos from all parties to invite.

Maybe the Liberals aren’t interested in flickr? Though I suspect many photos from all sides are not tagged well, making them all hard to find and invite.

Think your target market is a monorail user? Want to display ads to people as they zip past above the city? These people might be right for you, or maybe not.

Walking through The Galleries Victoria I noticed an advertisement trying to sell advertising space on the monorail station. All the information you need to get in contact with them, phone, mobile and email. But this last one made me shake my head.

The number of companies that think a companyname@isp email address is an ok corporate image astounds me. And to see a company that deals with advertising not understanding this is more worrying.

If you are a company or sole trader get yourself a domain and use that for advertising (web and email). Australian domains are really not that expensive. It will make you look more like a company and less like someone that operates out of their mom’s garage.

On Sunday Japan sent a whaling fleet off to hunt in the Antarctic. They say that the hunt is being conducted “purely for scientific purposes“. With an expected haul of 1000 whales I ask, why do they need to catch so many for scientific research?

They wish to measure gender and age distribution of whales. But isn’t this Heisenberg whale counting? Don’t you affect the result by your study?

Sea Shepherd, a radical environmental group, has decided to take matters into their own hands. They intend to “directly intervene and put an end to this criminal behaviour”. And if absolutely necessary will ram whaling vessels.

Is really necessary? Sea Shepard seem to have decided that Japan will not listen to reason, so drastic actions are needed.

What are other people saying:

• Japanese whaling outrage (20 Nov 2007)
• Japanese Whale Researchers Conclude Humpback Still Delicious with Soy Sauce and a Little Wasabi…. (20 Nov 2007)
• Japan takes the Hump (19 Nov 2007)

Other articles:

• Govt could have prevented Japan’s whale hunt: researcher (ABC, 20 Nov 2007)
• US joins critics of Japan whaling (19 Nov 2007)

I have recently been taking a lot of pictures at night. The idea is to have a gallery of things that people do not normally pay attention to.

Here is one I took last night of a Jacaranda hanging over a streetlight in Marrickville.

I received this shopping list and magnet from the local member recently. A nice pad and a useful selection of contact numbers.

It is interesting the order the phone numbers are in, not alphabetical. The first set of numbers are emergency numbers and local police stations. Then local governments and last general community numbers.

The local governments listed are: Marrickville, Canterbury, Leichardt, Ashfield. I suppose they are in order of percentage of the Grayndler electorate they comprise. The police stations are in the same order, except Canterbury is missing replaced by Newtown on the end.

Rounding out the list under Community are things like Medicare, Unions NSW, and Aircraft Noise Complaints. As well as Taxis Combined.

So, if you were Anthony Albanese what would you put on your shopping list?

There is a Federal Election coming up in Australia on 24 November 2007. All the major, and minor, politicians have a MySpace and a Facebook entry. But people seem to have neglected flickr.

The only groups I easily found were for some of the minor parties:

• DemocratsCampaign2007
• electionTracker 07 stringer selection
• Bennelong (ok, not a minor party, but only 2 photos)

And a group of humorous election mockups:

• LOL Pols

If you search through the photos you can find quite a few relevant to the election, if you use the right permutations of keywords. So, to make life easier I created a flickr group:

Federal Election ‘07

Adding my own photos and inviting all the photos that I could find.

I’m sure there are more photos than those I could find. So if you have your own election photos on flickr please add them to the group. The group is intended to be bipartisan and will accept photos from all parties, as well as other election related things.