New Zealand, an alcohol nation?
Doctors and counsellors said, on The Dominion Post, that “Alcohol is a contributing factor to 70 per cent of emergency hospital admissions and well over half of all crime“. Further it says:
It costs $425 million in ACC payouts, $655 million in the public health sector, and $1.17 billion in lost productivity each year.
2.8 people die every day from a booze-related illness or accident.
$425 million paid out by ACC for alcohol- related injuries last year.
$655 million a year cost to the public health sector.
$240 million extra in crime and related costs.
90 per cent of the 8000 prison inmates have an alcohol or drug problem.
$795 million The Government’s take from alcohol taxes and excise each year.
So, government is making huge loss? The amount of tax they collect from alcohol is not near enough to cover the cost that alcohol caused to government?
Also, alcohol has not been affected much by the ‘tough economic’ times.
September 2008: Beer, one dozen, 355ml cans $17.91. White wine cask $20.60
September 2004: Beer, one dozen, 355 ml cans $17.49. White wine cask $18.48
We should create alcohol powered cars, I reckon!
Miramar got a company, a flock of wild dolphins
A flock of wild dolphins visited us at Miramar, Wellington, New Zealand. Unfortunately not close enough for me to take better/clearer video.
What do you mean you need a BAILOUT?
In case you don’t notice, the one needing bailout is the kid who already has lots and lots of monopoly money and properties 
Clever cartoon from Washington Post.
Wellington surgeons removed tumor from East Timorese baby
Wellington surgeons volunteering their time and skills have removed a giant tumour from an East Timorese baby in a life-saving operation that pared a third off the youngster’s weight. Fourteen-month-old Alex Gonzaga and his mother Elisa Da Conceicao flew into the capital about a fortnight ago so Alex could be operated on by a 10-member surgical team at Wellington Hospital.
The 3.3-kilogram benign tumour was removed on Sunday and Alex is now recuperating.
Alex, who weighed about 11kg before the surgery, is expected to make a full recovery with no long-term consequences.
I was actually one of the interpreters for that child, Alex and his mum, Elisa, as they don’t speak English at all.
Installing EEE PC Xandros driver for Lexmark Z600 (Z615) series printer
Just got back from 6 weeks overseas trip, still in shock moving back to winter land. One thing I had in mind during my trip was to try to get my EEE PC to work with my cheap old Lexmark Z615 printer that I got free when I bought my old laptop. So I did some googling and found http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~mai/files/debianZ600.html and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=215657.
I can’t seem to print in landscape, but printing portrait black and white seem to work fine (haven’t tried printing in color). I’ve printed from Open Office Calc and from text editor; worked well for both.
I’m so proud of my little EEE PC laptop! It can now does real printing 
PHP best practice: always wrap conditional statement in closing brackets
This has caught me today, so I thought I’d write this down here so it’d stuck in my head.
Check out this code:
What would $p be if $b is true and what would it be if $b is false?
My first taste of Flock Web Browser
I just tried this new web browser on the block called ‘Flock‘ - the social web browser. To me, it looks and smells too much like Mozilla Firefox with custom theme and collection of plugins that integrate popular services like GMail, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, Flickr, etc.
According to Wikipedia, Flock(web browser) has received about $30M funding. I was so dumbfounded-jaw-droped-shocked at first. I mean it is (at least from my brief observation) just taking Mozilla Firefox + theme + plugins. But then I realised, this is about collective advertising of the biggest websites on the planet, hence the amount of money reflects the brands, not the technology.
I think it is very clever how the people at Flock uses the best browser to build their platform on. I can definetely see other big companies follow suit and pay good amount of money to get their services featured and tightly integrated into Flock.
Would I use it? Yes, I think I would, or at least try it. I use many of the services already integrated into Flock web browser, so I think I’ll try it to see if it will make my online experience better.
My oil price conspiracy theory
I think the expensive oil price has to do with Athabasca Oil Sands in Canada, the largest oil deposit second only to Saudi Arabia. The upside (to the West) is that Canada is a Western country, the downside? It is expensive to extract because the oil is in the sand and they have to separate them first using a giant boiler. E.g.: not as cheap as milking the oil out of the ground.
Now, if the Western countries are to reduce their dependencies to Middle East, they must start looking for alternaltive to cheap oil. And guess what’s an alternaltive of cheap oil is? Expensive oil!
The time is right to sell to the public that oil is expensive because of the war in Iraq and high demand in China and India. With the public convinced that the high price is caused by those ‘genuine’ reasons, if Saudi Arabia decide to cut off some oil supply, we can just switch to Canadian oil and the public would not notice the price (because it is already high). In other words, the high price is a conditioning excercise.
Ofcourse being a conspiracy theory, the high oil price might just be caused by war in Iraq and high demand …
Firefox Guinness World Record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours with 8,002,530 downloads
I received the official announcement email today that Firefox did set the Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours.
a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours … 8,002,530 downloads.
The most spectacular software release in history. Congratulation Firefox!