Mens Rea

Re-Engineering those Shop-a-Dockets for good…

asp1176 — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:20:51 +0000

So I was trolling digg and saw a link to a blog about barcodes; the upshot is it got me thinking about Australian barcodes and how I could make them better….for me.

So, enter piece of scrap paper A.K.A. receipt from a Coles supermarket (I don’t normally shop there BTW)

So now you know where I shop...or do you?...

Let me run through a few things here, starting from the left.

0903 – is the store number, in this case it was at Station St, Penrith.

04 – is the register number

1586 – is the receipt number. This number is unique, so if you plan on modifying one, make sure you find a receipt that has no path back to you…

100619 – is the expiry date of the discount; ie: 19th June 2010

040 – is the discount of 4 cents. Presumably, 990 would be $1 off.

4 – Check digit- well bugger me, why put a ‘security device’ on a barcode like this?

Next is the type of barcode. A brute force attack on this let me determine that it is a code128B barcode. And voila. The world is at your fingertips.

Now please don’t use this for evil, or to rip off those poor, innocent oil companies.

Dear Prime Minister,

asp1176 — Fri, 14 May 2010 02:31:29 +0000

I appreciate your open stance on communication from the public, and the feedback from which you can respond to. I also acknowledge that as Prime Minister, your duty is of far greater stress and difficulty than I could ever imagine.

However, I believe that the primary reason for which you have lost support from the public is because you have failed to deliver messages that resonate with the limbic system in people. Talk to their emotions, as you did on the 7:30 report re Climate Change and you will begin to win back support. If you view the voting public as following the Law of Diffusion of Innovation, then to achieve a “market share buy-in” of those underneath the bell curve ( ie get >68%to vote for you), you must hammer home what you believe in; your policies will then offer proof of what you believe.

WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IN?

People care what you believe in and for;

PEOPLE GET IDEAS, NOT POLICIES;

PEOPLE VOTE FOR IDEAS, NOT PEOPLE

KEVIN07 worked because of this.

You were dorky, and well deserved of the nick name ‘Milky Bar Kid’, but you won the election because people voted for the ideas they thought you believed in, NOT for who you are, and your oratory skill.

So, Prime Minister, please tell me

WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE?

In the original letter I used caps text as a method of highlighting important points, due there being no html to use a different colour.

Unethics or the Study of the Underhanded

asp1176 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:16:53 +0000

Unethical? I don’t think so.

If you describe someone’s behaviour as unethical, you think it is wrong and unacceptable according to a society’s rules or people’s beliefs.

Ethics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address questions about morality, such as what the fundamental semantic, ontological, and epistemic nature of ethics or morality is (meta-ethics), how moral values should be determined (normative ethics), how a moral outcome can be achieved in … (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/unethical )

Not morally approvable; morally bad; not ethical (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unethical)

Antonym – ethical

Examples:

It’s simply unethical to promote and advertise such a dangerous product.
I thought it was unethical for doctors to operate upon their wives.
…to investigate widespread unethical and illegal practices in banking.
…accusations of unethical conduct.

Today I have been labelled as such. The thing is, I’m not really bothered by it. I can dismiss this claim as coming from an old man, with ‘old man’ values. He even went on to say that I would be “haunted by it” if I didn’t deal with this situation in a proper, manly way. Well, I am feeling a little haunted more by the claim of being ‘unethical’. I actually had to Google the word. The above are the results of that search.

Without going into an argumentum ad hominem, (though I would desperately love to…) I will say that it does pose an interesting ethical question.

When dealing with an unethical person,

is it OK to be equally as unethical towards them?

Now the pure altruist in all of us will scream “No!”, but for me, having been there, and acted ‘unethically’ can I justify my actions based upon his unethical actions? In my mind my actions, can not pass the “If the shoe was on the other foot” test, i.e.: Would I have been OK with my actions if I were in his shoes? Well sir, I wouldn’t have acted as unethically as him in the first place. But, if I was pressed to answer that, I would say that what ever he gets, he had it coming to him. That’s an answer that shows no grace…But the injurious manor in which he inflicted me with his unethical behaviour has left me found wanting – revenge mostly…Maybe even justice.

So now the question is – do I really care about the old mans’ beliefs and opinions in the first place? It would be nice to have his approval. But I think I can live without it in this case.

Now, let the hate mail arrive!!

PS: The ‘old man’ is not my father, or any other family member for that matter. Just some guy at a church somewhere.

2B;≠2B

asp1176 — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:32:20 +0000

That is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.

Or in the original Kilngon
taH pagh taHbe’. DaH mu’tlheghvam vIqelnIS.
quv’a', yabDaq San vaQ cha, pu’ je SIQDI’?
pagh, Seng bIQ’a'Hey SuvmeH nuHmey SuqDI’,
‘ej, Suvmo’, rInmoHDI’?

When read through the eyes of one who is considering leaving their place of employment, this little ditty takes on (another) unintended meaning.

Do you, the soon-to-be-unemployed, stay and fight the good fight, against management, against poor workplace practices (like blogging during work time…) against stupidity in general, and by doing so, defeat them – resulting in a happy workplace for all. Or do you just get up and leave – to face the “fortunes” of Centrelink, of Job Search and of your mother-in-law?

To leave, or not to leave?

BTW, I do not proclaim any Danish heritage or Danish Royalty. But I do like Danishes.

Roll me over, & lay my bones to rest

asp1176 — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:03:07 +0000

Ahh, Saint JBJ. The words “Live while I’m alive & sleep when I’m dead” are some of the moist poignant lyrics one could listen to from rock music. They, like Dylan Thomas’s, apply to the Christian. The thought ‘Are we really alive?’ is a related question we would do well to ask of ourselves. It is when we act as a harmonious society that we exhibit ‘real life’. The irony being that we must do so, not corporately, but individually. Australians, as a rule of thumb, show this spirit (which we term as “mateship”) rather well.

The corollary to this position is that some people are not alive, even though they exist. These would be the people who take and do not give; who complain and do not provide solutions; who think and do not act. These are the people who, being isolated in a city of millions, find themselves already sleeping, and dead, before their life has even begun.

Mark Latham (RIP) called this ‘social capital’. This is what most other people call ‘community’. It’s what I call being alive.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

asp1176 — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 06:43:41 +0000

Dylan Thomas wrote those words two years before he succumbed to ‘that good night’. And it is said that when we marry, we settle down. Not so for the Christian (or the Jew). The path of the righteous winds upward (Prov.). We should all get wound up after being married. Some do get wound up, but in the wrong way. Then they need to wind down, before someone puts the wind up them.

We currently rent our house in the Mountains. Just after lunch this Sunday, our house had an unexpected guest. It was the owner of the house. He wanted to sell it to us. This has got to be one of the most bizarre occurrences in my life to date. We dutifully took his number and will consider his offer.

So, what is the connecting thought between these two seemingly strange paragraphs? Me. These two strange idea’s fill the void of thought for this afternoon. And I ponder the meaning of the two.

This weeks thoughts…

asp1176 — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:10:01 +0000

Before I get too tired and my meds kick in – Here are a few thoughts. It may seem a bit existential but (d0) we choose to ignore the poor. In Australia, if you are reading this, you have more money than the same amount of people that constitute the entire population of Australia, for there are THAT many poor. But we ignore them. I felt challenged to DONATE $1000AUD to a charity. I could do this, even though I am on a very modest salary. I may not have the internet for a few months – or whatever, but the idea here is that I would bounce back from the donation. How many more people could really give a grand and still have hot, clean water. We would still have food and a roof over your head and probably still have the internet connected. But even if all of the people I know donated that much, the poor would still exist. The root of the problem is and has been that of distribution. So I study logistics to understand how I can help fix the problem.

What are you doing to help the poor?

This issue has been eating away at me for a while now. It took a sermon by Paul Scanlon, from London UK, to highlight this for me. I hope I have been a catalyst for you to move on this issue too.

print “Hello world!” end print

asp1176 — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:22:41 +0000

In an effort to rage against the day, I have decided to ‘macroblog’ – in direct opposition to Twitter’s microblogging. So this will be slightly larger than the permitted 120 characters, and I won’t have to suggest friends to annoy with crappy third party apps (thank you facebook)…

Today I am successfully procrastinating. Watching tv with my kids and nerding it up on my lappy. Life is pretty good in the mountains. I do have a diploma in IT to finish though…