Could the news get any more wonderfully relevant?!?!

Recently, politicians have been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Both at a state and federal level, the opposition Liberal politicians seem to be having leadership troubles. However, as far as I see it, most of these issues are created by the media, for the media.

Take a look at this article for instance. It's just one of a large amount of articles about the apparent leadership issues within the Federal Liberal party, following the leaking of some emails.

Looking at the byline for that article, it states that

...a leaked email exposed deep divisions in the party's leadership.

This email was apparently from Malcolm Turnbull to Brendan Nelson. Mr. Turnbull was expressing his disagreement with the fuel excise cuts proposed by Dr. Nelson in his budget reply speech. It would appear there was some difference of opinion over these cuts, and Dr. Nelson's view finally prevailed, or he had the final word. Simple.

However, since then, not one news article that I have seen has objectively reported this without attempting to raise speculation on the nonexistant leadership issue that makes news. There was a disagreement between the two most powerful frontbenchers in the Opposition. So what? Both they and a variety of other Opposition frontbenchers and other prominent figures have been forced to deny any leadership troubles, and they have done so; many times. Yet still we keep reading reports on this leadership issue.

Is it so hard to find quality news? Is it too much to ask for objective media coverage? Do we really have to read unsubstantiated allegations in the news???

It does exactly what it's supposed to do, without a lot of clutter and other things that you dont need to just watch TV. And with the addition of scheduled recordings in the latest version, its all I need .

PS - the problems I had are now a non-issue with the newest releases (0.5.x release series)

On a side note, I won the competition to locate the new site, run in the Zazz forums. The following clues were dropped:

• It's a something.com.au
• It is a Miss
• It starts with Z
• It looks a lot like zazz

It only took me three minutes (according the forum post time stamps) to find it :S. After giving misszazz.com.au a try, and finding it didn't work, I found a list of girl's names starting with Z. Zoe jumped out because it was about the only name on there that I recognised, and Voila! (got to keep up the french connection): misszoe.com.au . Sofia (from zazz) and Christelle (from the coffee shop next door) are going to give the site their best shot, so here's best wishes for their success!!

Cheers,

Matt

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To get the desired effect in HTML, the AA must be enclosed in <pre> tags to tell the browser that the text is preformatted, and so spaces etc. will be preserved.

One of my personal favourite demonstrations is the well put together BB (AA -> BB, get it? ). BB showcases what AA art can do, and although now 10 years old, it is no less exciting. Below are some highlights:

As you can see, the possibilities are (almost) endless! If you so desire, you can watch all your movies in AA too, using aaxine:

Recognise dear Smeagol?

So, if you really want to amaze your friends, render them in AA! (not Alcoholics Anonymous, ASCII ART!)

Currently, development effort is being channeled towards this new version (the screenshot above is from the development code (svn)). In my opinion, Elisa is fast shaping up to be something exciting .

Actually there are plenty of better things to do, but I finally threw together this theme. There's still problems with it, since I threw it out so quickly, but it looks better than the previous theme, imho. It is by no means complete, and some pages in it are based quite heavily on the default Kubrick theme that comes with wordpress. I also had to upgrade wordpress to get it to support a tag I borrowed from this theme :S .

I think thats all the news for now - if anyone wants a copy of this theme just let me know...

Cheers,

Matt

I Can't Remember Them

So, while I'm sure I would have cranked out some great pieces on this little-viewed site, I can no longer remember what I was going to write, nor even what provided me with this inspiration .

Oh and I need to rework a blog theme one day too... (and find a job)

We feel that online stores are too bogged down with items. You know what it's like, you go to a major internet department store and unless you know exactly what you want it's near impossible to find something suitable for your 3rd cousin's 65th birthday. And if we were going to just sell one thing for the rest of the company's lifetime we don't think we'd make very much money, so we keep things fresh by selling new things every day.

One of the best things for me is that the rollover between items is at midnight EST, so only 10pm over here. This makes checking the daily zazz a nightly ritual.

So far I've bought a 400GB external hard drive, and a USB digital TV tuner, both of which are (hopefully) somewhere between here and Melbourne at the moment. Now I'm just hanging out for them to arrive :S

EDIT: They've arrived!!!! Yipee!