"Footy saved from World Cup threat" read the front page of the Herald Sun yesterday.    What an alarming title – you would think FIFA was going to roll their tanks in and destroy the AFL headquarters from a headline like that.

So what has actually happened?  Let’s pick a few key quotes from the article.

The AFL and the “biggest show on earth” will co-exist if Australia hosts the soccer World Cup in 2018 or 2022.  Co-exist is a funny word.  It implies some sort of equality.  For example, the AFL and soccer don't "co-exist" at the moment - for the best part, the AFL totally dominates it in the media.  Does the AFL expect that this will happen during a World Cup hosted in Australia?  It won't even be 50-50 - the World Cup will, dominate.  The AFL's season continuing during the World Cup is not about whether it is legally allowed to - it is whether the AFL wishes to commit financial suicide by attempting to do so.

Skilled Stadium [Kardinia Park in Geelong], Subiaco Oval, Gold Coast Stadium and Adelaide Oval would also be off limits to the AFL during the Cup.  Oh yes, the FFA/Federal Government is taking these venues, modernising them, upgrading their capacity, using them for a couple of months – and then handing the nice shiny new venues back to the AFL to play on year after year.  Not to mention the MCG and Homebush.  Are we supposed to think the AFL is doing it tough?

The government guarantee appears to contravene a FIFA regulation that a major sport can’t run in the host nation during a World Cup.  Actually, the truth is a little simpler than that – the AFL is not a major sport.  The FIFA regulation relates to events such as Wimbledon, or the Ashes series.  Even Major League Baseball continued in the United States in 1994, and MLB is much bigger than AFL.

[Demetriou said] "We’ve always said we would be providing the MCG and Skilled Stadium [Kardinia Park]"  How nice of him to be able to speak for the Victorian State Government and the City of Greater Geelong.  Did the AFL "provide" the MCG for the Commonwealth Games, or was it simply that it isn’t theirs to provide?  

The AFL has also been concerned FIFA would require the MCG for longer, before and after the tournament.  This refers to a proposal to "rectangularise" the MCG temporarily, requiring the ground for longer for conversion, which was announced publicly in December last year.  However, this proposal had already been eliminated by the bid taskforce privately before this time and also again publicly about 6 hours after the news story was published (in the Herald Sun, no surprises there).  For some reason, despite the fact that it is not going to happen, it gets brought up time and time again by the AFL and the Herald Sun, alongside the equally unlikely threat of "cancelling a season and sending clubs broke".

In fine form as usual, the Herald Sun has followed up with another article today, "League compo for cup games".  This is all about the compensation they will receive for ... hang on - what are they being compensated for?  They apparently aren't going to stop their season or reduce the number of games.  They are mathematically perfectly capable of honouring their existing stadium contracts even with some of them being unavailable, so no issues there.  They are going to have to play some games in reduced capacity venues for 10 weeks, certainly - but this is negated by the fact that they are also going to play in increased capacity stadiums for years to come - surely hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government funded infrastructure is enough?  In fact, the United States bid - our closest competitor for the 2022 World Cup - is already taking advantage of the ammo being provided to them to promote their own bid - how much compensation is the AFL going to pay the federal government if it is their antics which causes our bid to fail?

Melbourne's self proclaimed title of the "sports capital of the world" is now a joke - nowhere else would you see the largest newspaper in such a city against the World Cup.

I really feel sorry for the hundreds of thousands of Victorians who support both codes, as well as the hundreds of thousands who have no specific interest in soccer but want the World Cup to come here.  Unfortunately to the rest of the country and the rest of world, their local media is portraying the state as extremely insular and closed minded.

... and to think that if the World Cup comes here, the Herald Sun would be the first to complain when Melbourne only hosted six matches and Sydney hosts twenty!  But why shouldn't Sydney get more?  Not only are they upgrading their largest venue - Stadium Australia - by adding 5000 seats and installing a retractable glass roof, they are also offering their secondary stadium (Sydney Football Stadium) as well as offering to build a new 40,000 capacity venue in Western Sydney!  The New South Wales Government and the people of Sydney obviously want to host World Cup matches, not treat it like some sort of invading threat. 

The AFL can't really be blamed for their actions - their job is to look after their sport - but the Herald Sun is supposed to be a media outlet, not the AFL's PR department.

If I were an international football fan planning the best location to base myself during a World Cup in Australia, I'd be looking at the city with three venues (and within commuting distance to Canberra and Newcastle).  Melbourne wouldn't even be on the radar.  Is the Victorian Government looking after the interests of the state, or the interests of the AFL?

In a previous house blog post, I mentioned doing a serious of "before and after" posts about how the new house compares to the old one - after all, we already have a house so there must be something different about the new one worth talking about!  Here is the first - not focusing on any room this time, but the land and house as a whole.

One of the major complaints about our current house is that it is too small!  That isn't strictly correct - square metre wise, it isn't that bad, but it is laid out in such an inefficient way.

In theory, our current house has four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, three living areas, a study, a workshop and three separate outdoor entertaining areas (two decks and a paved area).  It doesn't exactly read like a bad real estate agent spiel at all - I have high hopes that when we sell it, the house will be very appealing to someone else with different usage patterns or requirements to us!
 
In practice, half of the rooms are full of stuff (in boxes or crates if we are lucky - in a pile if not) due to a lack of built-in storage, and the rooms that aren't are .. lets say, very cosy.

The main kitchen/living area is on the upper floor and doesn't have direct walk-out access to the backyard - unless you go out the front door and down the driveway.  In addition, the garage is around the back of the house, which means we have a driveway separating one of the other living areas - the downstairs lounge - from the yard area.  Neither of these are particularly helpful when you have kids - of course, it wasn't the kind of thing that was on our minds when we were 23!

A picture is worth a thousand words .. so here are a couple of diagrams.  The first is our current house on the left, and new house on the right, at the same scale, and both aligned so that up is north.  The outline of the old house is based on the Google Maps satellite view, and the outline of the new house is based on a diagram provided by our architect.

The new block is about 20% larger than the old one, and the new house also has a much bigger footprint.   I didn't think the block difference was particularly obvious from this map.  Note one thing which isn't apparent from this picture is that the old house has the same floor area on both levels, whereas in the new house the ground floor is only about 60% the area of the first floor.

The 'garden' area on this diagram pretty much means 'the rest' - some bits are lawn, but many areas are concreted pathways, rock gardens, retaining walls, or otherwise areas which are impractical for use as 'backyard' due to shape and slope.  Note that this applies equally to the new house as well - it can't be helped on a sloped block - but at least we are taking it into consideration this time and making an effort to minimise it!

The second diagram shows both floors of the old house, and then matches up the corresponding room locationss on the first floor new house.  Note that these images are also the same scale - it looks totally wrong, especially compared to the previous diagram, but I have triple-checked and put it down to the fact that the old house outline on the first diagram included the eaves.



As you can see almost all of the old house will "fit" on the first floor of the new house, with a room to spare (eventually for the third child)!  This is great as it means we (including the kids) generally won't be running up and down the stairs constantly - pretty much only when we leave the house.

The unmarked areas on the old house ground floor include the garage, laundry, and storage/workshop/office area.  I won't worry about these ones in this post, but they will get their own post eventually when I do the room-by-room comparisons!

It's probably no secret if you have been noticing my updates on Facebook, but for anyone who has known me since school (or shortly after), well, I hope you are sitting down - yes, I run!

So what has inspired me to do this? Wii, iPhone and Facebook. (There, is that the Chuq you are more familiar with?)

It started when I got Emma a Nintendo Wii (with WiiFit) for Christmas. That was an amusing story in itself, she asked for one and I was adamant it was too expensive. I'm pretty sure she thought it was a lost cause up until Christmas Day! We both started clocking up an hour each a day of running, slalom skiing, juggling, karate, boxing and flapping your arms madly like a bird. In any case it was enough for us to work up a sweat. It also lets you do a body test which measures your weight and BMI, and along with a balance test, your "Wii Fit age" - basically, what sort of state your body is in. I wasn't thrilled when it told me I was 41 on the first day, but I wasn't surprised either!

In January, my super fit sister-in-law Laura asked if I wanted to go running with her and Ben around Risdon Brook Dam. I thought, why not, lets see how the Wii Jogging compares to the real thing. I quickly installed Runkeeper on my iPhone - after seeing it used by friends on Facebook - and set off. As you can see from the map, after 3km I was buggered.

A couple of weeks later the boss of my department at work was asking around for volunteers - he had signed up for the Hobart Run The Bridge, a 10km fun run, but had to pull out and needed a substitute.  I knew a few others who were running/walking the event so I thought, why not? ("Why not" seems to be a common theme here!) I would only be walking it anyway.



The big day came and my plan was to alternate running 2km then walking 2km. I started off with a 500m walk (simply because it was too packed to travel any more than that) to warm up, then started on the run. In the end I walked from 3km to 4km (up Rosny Hill) and 7km to 7.5km (past the Cenotaph) but I shocked myself and ran pretty much all the rest! (Runkeeper map here)

Well, that was it - I had the running bug.  By having details of my runs (times, distances, speeds, calories burned) published to Facebook, it gave me a bit of accountability as I knew that everyone would know how much I was (or wasn't) doing. It keeps track of the totals for each week and month so I can set myself targets (either distance or speed).

Emma has started tracking her walks (which are a lot easier to do when you have two children in a pram) and so far she has clocked up over 150km!

I've set a few personal bests, which is why I had put off writing this post - I keep hitting new milestones!  The most recent has been averaging over 10km/h for 6km.  5-7 km seems to be my "sweet spot" at the moment.  This is just as well, since my upcoming schedule includes the Mothers Day Classic (8km on May 9) and City to Casino (7km on May 16).  I'm lucky to have a fantastic employer who pays not only for sports tops but for registration for events such as these.

Needless to say we don't get on the Wii much any more - usually only just for a quick weigh-in.  It doesn't seem to be hurting - between us we have lost 18kg and burned 19000 calories in a bit over 3 months!  I'm almost tempted to get some Withings WifiScales ... but that would be a bit geeky wouldn't it?

The Hare-Clark voting system as used in Tasmania's multi-member electorates, is one of the fairest political systems in the world. In the recent Tasmanian election, five members are elected from each of the five electorates, which make a total of twenty-five members in the House of Assembly.

One of the benefits of this system is that the end result is very similar to the will of the voting public.

Take a look at Australia's federal lower house, the House of Representatives. This system uses single member electorates. Each of the 150 seats nationally elects a single member using preferential voting. But look at the last federal election - over 16% of voters chose a member outside of the major parties (ie. Greens, Democrats, Family First, another smaller party or another independent) as their first preference - but in the final makeup of the house, only 2% of the seats are represented by a non-major party.

In the recent Tasmanian election we see how the system *should* work. The first preference votes received were split between Labor 37%, Liberal 39% the Greens 21% and other parties 3%. The final distribution of seats is Labor 10 (40%), Liberal 10 (40%) and the Greens 5 (20%). A much more accurate representation of the choice of the people.

However, people need to know how to work the system to their advantage! As you can see above, the result was very close - particular in Denison where the fifth seat was between Liberal Elise Archer and independent Andrew Wilkie. The graph below, originally from Antony Green's Election Blog (an excellent resource) demonstrates it well. (Note this particular graph was originally from this post.)

Along the bottom of the graph, you see each candidate as they (or in the case of those who secured a quota, as their excess votes) are eliminated. When one of the coloured lines goes to the bottom of the graph, it means they were the last candidate for that party. The dark grey line near the bottom shows "exhausted" votes. Voters were only required to enter numbers 1 to 5 - anything above that was optional. When one of the ballot papers "runs out of numbers" so to speak, it becomes an "exhausted" ballot.



Notice the rather small difference between the final Liberal candidate (Archer) and the independent (Wilkie) at the end of the count.

Now, notice by how much the grey bar rose when the last Labor candidate (Bacon's excess) and the last Green candidate (Burnett) were eliminated! It seems these were people who voted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 for either Labor or the Greens, and no-one else. These votes are often wasted (as it is very unlikely that one electorate will elect five members from the one party) as the votes often "flow" onto other parties.

Without making predictions as to who would vote for who, I'd say it would be likely that most Labor voters would put any other party above the Liberals, and most Greens would put Wilkie before any other party. The second point in particular can be demonstrated by the large gain Wilkie received when Burnett was eliminated.

If only a small fraction of the the 1-2-3-4-5 Labor or Green voters had've put #6 as Wilkie, we would be looking at a parliament with 10 Labor, 9 Liberal, 5 Green and 1 Independent - which clearly would have a massive effect on who makes the next government!

We have our first official design back from our architect! Latest floor plan below:


(click for larger image - also note, these were on A3 so I couldn't scan the entire page (including the block at the bottom of it), please remember these plans are copyright Room 11, just like the ones in my last floor plan post - there, that's the legal bit out of the way!)

Changes include:
* Some room sizes have been changed, e.g. the front bedrooms are longer, to allow for extra hallway cupboards.
* The guest bedroom has also been slightly increased in size.
* An additional alcove near the laundry for the chest freezer and beer fridge.
* A laundry chute from the kitchen to the laundry (which is a bit out of line at the moment - a work in progress)
* The pantry/master bedroom doorway area has been rejigged to allow for a small desk in the kitchen.
* Adjusting the western wall of the first floor to add some extra built-in space.
* Kitchenette in the home theatre.

The biggest change is of course the big "extra" room at the back of the ground floor. This came about when we were discussing future expansion capabilities ("just in case") and we thought it would be the best spot, and it was be easier to excavate while building rather than try to do it in the future (which would be pretty much impossible).

The trade-off of course is that of cost. Our architect has made it no secret that this is not going to be cheap - at least he is not setting us up for a big shock! We have therefore made the decision to leave the guest bedroom, guest bathroom, home theatre and the spare room downstairs totally unfinished (no plaster, floor, painting or electrical - just the plumbing fittings in the bathroom). Only the hallway and laundry will be completed (and obviously the garage will have very little work required in it).

One thing we have noticed is how well bedroom 4 fits our original "multi-purpose" room - its visible from the kitchen, out of the way of the rest of the house, has glass windows/doors between it and the rest of the living area ... but of course we would lose a bedroom. We'd need to: stop at 2 kids, or make two of them share a room, or get the extra room downstairs done... no, I'll stop thinking about that now!

I think I'll do a series of "before and after" house posts which include comparisons in areas between our current house and the new house. I think it would be a good opportunity to point out not only the good bits of the new house but the bad bits of the old house!

Can it be? Is the small boy really SIX months old? Alas yes, it is true! Six months is a big milestone... time for solids! Say goodbye to tidy mealtimes (who am I kidding, we have a toddler) and ever-so-delightful exclusively breastfed baby poo and get ready for messy floors and messier nappies.

Of course it is inevitable, they do need to eat eventually, and he was showing all the signs... very interested in mealtimes, chewing at us, able to manipulate smaller objects into his mouth, nice strong boy able to sit up in the highchair, tongue thrust reflex well and truly gone, drooling up a storm ready to start digesting all that foody goodness and of course, trying to swipe food when it was left in close proximity. He even managed to steal a dried cranberry from his sister a few weeks back.. he sat there looking most impressed with himself as I prised it from his little fist.

So, being a lazy family we don't bother with purees... straight to grown up food. "WHAT???" I hear you ask... "but... won't he choke?" umm no, well at least it's not any more likely than a baby eating smooth mush, in fact there is reason to believe that a baby feeding him or herself is less likely to choke as they are controlling the rate at which food enters their mouth. It is a fantastic thing to watch... he will bite (well, gum - no teeth yet) off a piece of food, move it around in his mouth, chew then gag. Your heart is in your throat the first few times but you soon learn to watch for any signs that indicate that they may be getting into trouble. Soon enough a piece of food will emerge from the tardis. Seriously, I have no idea how some of these bits fit in there in the first place, but he has managed to work out that he has bitten off more than he can chew - literally - and out it comes. I love that we are teaching him to eat and participate in mealtimes without having to cook him special food, and without a gazillion ice cube trays taking up valuable freezer space.

So far he's had... avocado, sweet potato, pumpkin, potato, carrot, runner bean, snow pea, tomato, broccoli (the only thing he's consistently rejecting), steak, toast, a fruit bun he swiped from me one day, banana, mango, watermelon, peach, apple, pear and yoghurt. No reactions so far, but we're really not expecting any.. and oh.my.gosh... the boy can EAT!

Some pictures for your viewing pleasure...