Went for a walk down Marrickville road in Marrickville a couple of days ago. It was interesting to notice the things that have changed since the last time I visited some years ago (and what hasn’t).
I remember the the McDonalds had closed, but not at the time been replaced. And I was interested to see it had been replaced by Oporto.
So, is Oporto the new McDonalds? It is interesting to see its expansion in Sydney. And nice to see an Australian fast food chain storing doing so well.
I see also that Singapore Gourmet has gone. Not my fourite Vietnamese restaurant, but ok if every it was later at night and everything else was closed. Though it seems to have been replaced by another restaurant of the same type.
And, on the corner of Victoria and Marrickville roads, there is still the trusty Victoria Yeros. Where else would a cab driver get food at 2am in the area?
IBM decided not to buy them, though Oracle seems to think it is a good idea. It will be interesting to see how the acquisition of Sun fits into Oracle’s host.
One question that comes out of the acquisition is: what will happen to MySQL? Oracle being the premier product, will it try to push the lesser aside in the business market? And will all the business and open source projects that use it suffer?
There are a couple of articles where people think there is nothing to worry about. Over at Forbes, Victoria Barret thinks it MySQL will fit a missing niche for Oracle, and will help it combat Microsoft.
And Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame thinks it is the open source nature of MySQL that will save it. Seeing that it is the community that push most of its development at the moment, and its licensing. There shouldn’t be a worry about Oracle axeing it.
Doing an Oracle subject at the moment I can see some of the advantages. But I don’t really want to have to spend large sun on Oracle just to run my blog.
The Pirate Bay court case if over, and the owners of the service have been marched down the plank. The four were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement (2, 3).
Now, are the users of Pirate Bay to be deprived of their bits of torrent?
Well apparently not. The owners foresaw this as a potential ending, and distributed the servers far and wide. So, despite the verdict, all the users can still sail the high seas, and go where their bandwidth will carry them.
The few remaining buildings and chimney of the former Carlton United Brewery on Broadway, Chippendale.
It was interesting to come back to Sydney after a year, and find the space opposite UTS raised to the ground. An expanse of open space, and this one tall chimney.
I see that this project has been coming along for some years. And that it is intended to be a green urban renewal project.
It will be interesting to see what it looks like when finished, in 6 to 8 years. But for now it is nice to have a little more open space so close to Sydney CBD.
Sign from a carriage of a State Rail train in Sydney.
The sign reads:
Emergency Procedure
1. If danger present move to another carriage
2. If you are last close the door behind you
3. Inform guard or driver of danger
4. Remain on the train
5. Follow instructions from crew
The question in response to 2 is:
What if the danger wants to follow you to another carriage, are they the last and should they close the door behind themselves?
In my first month back in Australia I went out to Rhodes too many times. Buy stuff at Ikea. Buy stuff we didn’t have time for the first time. And the bring stuff back that needed replacing (though their replacing damaged good policy is quite good).
Rhodes looks like Mirvac is terraforming it into a new upmarket business and residential suburb. Though at the moment, as you can see from all the blue handled shopping trolleys, the major draw card to the suburb appears to be Ikea.
Maybe there is more to Rhodes, being just off the Paramatta River, but it doesn’t look that interesting walking between the shopping centre and the station.
Today the Australian government announced its decision on submission to build the new National Broadband Network. Telstra put itself out of the bid last year by putting in an incomplete submission. So who of the remaining tenders were to take the cake?
None of them it seems. The government decided that none of the bids were up to scratch. So awarded the contract to itself.
The government announced its intention to establish a new public company to build the network. Spending $43 billion on the new entity to create a new fibre network. And interestingly, they now intend to do fibre to the home, rather than fibre to the node. Which seems like a much better proposal.
A question remains though, which a friend put forward: If the government is building the network, is this so it can bypass all the ISPs, and more easily implement its own filtering/censorship policy?
It has been interesting, though getting boring, to watch the banter about the latest book by Bettina Arndt, The Sex Diaries. It seems to have split people into two camps.
All men are Liars has a post about The Sexless Marriage, which pays lip service to both views, but seems to sit more on the ‘women need to put out more‘ side.
Where as Wendy Frewplants her foot in the opposite camp. Rejecting the ‘Just do it’ mantra, she blames the problem on ugly men. With the view that men put off women by not taking care of their appearance.
Even Miranda Devine has set pen to paper about this book. And tries to take a moderate view. Although it looks like someone forgot to edit the piece as it is not quite as sharp as usual.
Are women wowsers? Are men too eager?
It looks to me like a failure of project management. Not enough communication; a slip in project scope; and not a unity of vision.
Of course, all this made me think of the Protestants skit from Part I of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
Australian politician Stephen Conroy has begun distancing himself from his highly controversial internet censorship policy. Although this is not a complete backdown. There still the intention to implement a list of filtered sites, just changing what is deemed to be filtered.
(in Marrickville anyway.)
I see also that Singapore Gourmet has gone. Not my fourite Vietnamese restaurant, but ok if every it was later at night and everything else was closed. Though it seems to have been replaced by another restaurant of the same type.
And, on the corner of Victoria and Marrickville roads, there is still the trusty Victoria Yeros. Where else would a cab driver get food at 2am in the area?
