My experience and practical tips from doing a Working Holiday in Australia. Sharing my experience of life in Australia and what to prepare for a Working Holiday.

Starting on September 28th, our short story reading group will read The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke. We’ll discuss a story every Monday and Friday. I haven’t been participating in the group for about a year because I got burned out on reading SF short stories. But I’m hoping to participate again. I miss reading science fiction. I’ve read the first three stories to get back into the swing of things. My reaction was the same to all three. I felt these science…

Michaelangelo Matos / Rolling Stone: Some of the biggest music deals in recent years have involved songwriting catalogs, from Bob Dylan in 2020 to Justin Bieber in 2025 to Pete Townshend this spring, many fetching nine-figure buyouts. Most of these have come from private-equity firms looking for reliable investments.But independent labels and artists are fast becoming the focus for a number of recently minted investment firms — companies, and catalogs, of seemingly every size. And one label…

In 546, Goth King Totila walked into Rome after a year-long siege.The city was nearly empty due to starvation and suicide brought on by the siege. The siege had been so devastating for the inhabitants that Isaurian members of the guard helped the Goths scale the walls and open the gates.Unlike the typical behavior of Germanic tribes when going through enemy territory, Totila had shown great restraint and not ravaged the countryside. It seems he wanted to restore the era of Theodoric, ruling the…

Took a while but today was the first day of wearing a jumper. The temperature is going down slowly, but there is that general lift before it drops and stays low for the next 6 months.

At the deep-end, I suppose! I had a massive Heart Attack on Thursday gone, and when I say massive, I was fighting the fucker for an hour before I agreed with my friend Julie (who almost certainly saved my life) that an ambulance probably did need to be called! And this is not to paint me as the macho hero, valiantly fighting death with the sword of survival and the shield of unfinished

The bombs just don't stop falling. Russians drop usually 5 bombs at the time. And they repeat it 24/7. We are just laying and thinking: "We are waiting till one will hit our house". Or if we are flying on training we just observe how the other set of the bombs land into the city. And we can't do anything about it. The shops are working, next to the one we use 2 burned cars, a fpv hit there just 2 days ago. The cute barista made me a coffee (I started to drink coffee again) we had small chat. I…

It is inexcusable that in the wealthy part of the world — like Canada — there continues to be such poverty, especially because the problem of poverty is simple and solvable. (If you think Canada doesn’t have enough money, here’s what is happening with defense spending.) And that’s too bad, because just in Ontario alone, Nearly … Continue reading A dearth of stories on poverty

Looks Unfamiliar with Mic Wright talking to Tim Worthington about the NatWest Piggies, Eerie. Indiana, Musical Chairs by Kinky Friedman, High On A Rocky Ledge by Moondog, the National Record Of Achievement and more...!

Dancing with the Stars 35's celebrities faced their first week of a speedier, 7-day schedule. How did they do? And whose holes need filling? Marshal Knight recaps for us!

How a makefile turns the SQLcl, Git and dbLinter commands of an APEX project into short make commands, and how a Git-based sync script stops APEXlang imports from overwriting your colleagues' App Builder changes.

Recent Comments balcony — miawiwhbse: “True, fully involved attention is something extremely difficult. At its best it often is an achievement. How hard it is to let an object be…”

[1966]A Mexican garage classico. We all know because La Flama Blanca: Kenny Fucking Powers!Mesmerising bass, mucho twangery and a groovy beat baby.

When I was a young boy, we used to get the official XBOX magazine, and the demo discs that came with it. That’s how I first played Brute Force, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and even NCAA Football.¹ It’s also where I first played James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing’s co-op mode — where you play as two anonymous MI-6 agents — and two sample missions: the game’s starting mission where you rappel down the outside of a mountain base, and another where you chase down a tanker driven by Richard Kiel’s…

It's been awhile since I've put someone in the spotlight for the It's About TV Interview, a process so terrifying that it's been known to send people fleeing in abject horror. But enough about the readers... (And, by the way, they love the subjects; it's the interviewer himself that they can do without.)However, David Hofstede, author of the Comfort TV website, has bravely stepped into the breech to talk about the upcoming second edition of his book,When Television Brought Us Together:…

The biggest offense of Wonka's The Golden Ticket is not the disembodied voice of Gene Wilder, resurrected 10 years after his death via AI. My review explores and explains.

With this in mind I wondered how far I could get in removing the parts of Liquid Glass I don’t like in NetNewsWire. Turns out I could get pretty far, though it comes at the expense of using NSToolbar (as predicted). Note: this stuff is just on a branch. One night of play, not real design or consideration. (But this is code, not mockups.) It’s not about to ship this way. But I’ll share anyway, because it does hint at some possible ideas for NetNewsWire’s future. Source: inessential: That About…

This time of year, I end up writing grant proposals to fun my summer field work. This year, there’s the added fun of writing a sabbatical proposal and a proposal for a one-year, named, research chair. All of these proposals will try to get support for my work at Isthmia. In particular, these proposals will ask for time to transform our current work into a book length manuscript (and catch up on bibliography to frame the project in recent studies of the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Greece, the…

Finally! After claiming TWO* pixels in Pixel Area, it inspired me to finally make a button for this blog. * X:91 Y:95 and X:92 Y:95. They are neighbors in Signal Basin.Here it is: I'll also add the button somewhere in the ABOUT section so it'll be easier to find in the future. Feel free to download it directly as I don't think I'll delete it anytime soon. I plan on making a button garden someday so I can add blogs/websites I love visiting. I want to be better at sharing other blogs, but not in…

Welcome to this bizarro world

Morning comes with fog. 7:00 sail off anchor, light north wind and less fog. A half dozen tacks, gentle sailing, almost ghosting, out of the cove. Rounding the northern tip of Spruce Island, I find Mark out rowing a skiff with his dog. He lives on Spruce Island four months of the year. He points to his Contessa sloop moored nearby, and we talk about sailing the Maine coast. We talk about my slow drift across the water, going fast versus going slow, the trade off between traditional cruising…

September 19 is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, as well as Software Freedom Day. There was, for the first time in a while, here in Wellington the Software Freedom Day (un)conference! Organized by OpsDev.

I came across an interesting study out of Singapore that tracked children’s screen time from age one to eight, then measured their academic performance and working memory years later. Two things stood out: Even after adjusting for other factors, screen time at age one, at eighteen months, and at age six was still linked to weaker academic performance years later. Total screen time across childhood was consistently tied to lower academic performance, and the earliest exposure, in infancy, showed…

Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!” Warship Wednesday 23 September 2026:…

I decided to mess with the design for the Halloween season. I don't plan to do this for every season, obviously. My old style will return in November. Until then, I decided to have a little bit of fun. More little touches may appear as the whimsy catches me. I did a bit of digging for the old school Halloween images, so I thought I'd share the resources I used, as well as give them credit. Clker had a fun selection of free clip art The Graphics Fairy has a veritable library of public domain…

I've genuinely haven't had much to write about. There's been some post ideas, but most of 'em have ended up shelved for one reason or another. These past months have been a real creative drought for me. I think I need a shit-post side blog. One where I can kind of write about whatever without worrying about the content or if the posts starts to sound like a journal entry1. I think since this is my first blog, I overthink too much about what I put into it. Speaking of getting too into my head, I…

Thanks to Ava’s post, I discovered Pixel Area. It’s a cool project offering 10.000 “pixels” for the indiweb community. It’s a nice way to find other interesting blogs and websites. My pixel is located here.

The horseshoe theory is probably one of the funniest pseudo-scientific political “theories” out there. In case you’re unfamiliar with this theory, I’m sorry to be the one to disturb your blissful ignorance of it (that I’m jealous of), but here’s what it is: It’s the understanding that the political spectrum is shaped like a horseshoe in which Far-Right and Far-Left beliefs, like illiberalism and anti-establishment positions, converge and both become functionally the same. I would like to…

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The right place to ask why Oktoberfest starts in September, and how Lo-Fi music snuck into your cookingHi there! On September 19th, Oktoberfest began in Germany, which literally means "October festival." So, naturally, it starts in September.It reminds me of Russia's October Revolution, year 1917, which by our calendar actually happened in November, because the tsars were still running on a different one.Two perfectly mismatched facts to sum up the disorientation…

it's weird that ai got too dangerous to keep advancing right around the time money got more expensive to borrow— dr. rich traditions, JD (@helldude.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 11:37 AMAt a time when everybody seems to be criticizing AI and particularly the large frontier LLM base models of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, it is helpful to distinguish between the different schools of arguments.The group which initially dominated the coverage but which seems to be losing ground is the…