".. that which is adequately explained by stupidity". - Robert J. Hanlon.

If you get your information about the National Broadband Network from the mainstream media, you couldn't really be blamed for thinking that the sky is falling in.  A lot existing media companies, including television and newspapers, have had their industry turned on its head by the internet, and as high speed communications becomes ubiquitous this is only going to get worse for them.  They are struggling, just like the music industry did in the 1990s and 2000s.

However that isn't what this blog post is about!  Sometimes you find someone who is well intentioned, but just doesn't do their research!  This article from the 22 May 2011 edition of the Launceston Examiner is a perfect example.

Tasmania faces long NBN wait

BY MATT MALONEY

22 May, 2011

To start with, the premise of the article flawed...

LAUNCESTON could have to wait until 2021 to be connected to the National Broadband Network.
[...]
... the company has not identified towns and cities to be connected to the network beyond last week's announcement on the project's first and second stages.

This is easily refuted by this press release from Stephen Conroy's office which was published over a year ago.

Also note the end date of 2021 - this appears to have been calculated by adding the ten year build time onto this year - ignoring the fact that construction started about a year and a half ago.

There are also comments such as:

"Tasmanian NBN users have told The Sunday Examiner that communication with internet users with a lower digital bandwidth was much slower than the one-gigabyte-a-second promised."

Gold. Confused by two different things in one sentence! The maximum connection speed of an NBN connection at present is 100 megabits per second, not 1000 - which, although it is within the network capabilities, it is not available to residential customers as yet.  He then fails on the difference between megabits per second and megabytes per second.  Easily confusing to the lay person, but someone educating the public should be better informed.  For those playing at home, a 100 megabit per second connection should result in a throughput of around 12 megabytes a second.

One Smithton business owner, Brett Dawes, said from his six months' experience, internet users must be on the same bandwidth for the network to work properly.

"There is not much point having a patch connected here and a patch connected there - it's all or nothing," he said.

Poorly worded, but I see the point he is trying to make... however, it ignores the fact that people in one house could be using the single FTTH connection to use several different services!  You could have someone watching ABC iView on their laptop, someone else streaming a movie in the lounge room, a third person one a video chat with the grandparents in another part of the house, and the teenager playing online games in his bedroom.  All with enough bandwidth left over for general web browsing and making phone calls!  Not to mention - a lot of the time the "other end" will not be another end user, but a data centre with huge pipes to the outside world!

There is enough misinformation about the NBN floating around in the media - from other news sources and opposing political parties - without errenous articles such as this one!

Just a note on the Hanlon quote at the top - I'm not suggesting stupidity in this case - just lack of research! 

• Postscript: Andrew from Digital Tasmania is in the process of contacting said journo, to offer advice in future instances!

Hmmmm no they don't!

Maybe life has gotten in the way a wee bit lately for writing blog posts, but we shall endeavour to fix that... I think that as more starts happening with the house the updates will be more forthcoming.  Two months and there should be plenty to write about :D

As for a life update from us, we've been to Adelaide for the national band championships over Easter.  Lots of Daddy and Kiddy park time whilst I was playing then a lovely family day at the Zoo on ANZAC day before heading home.

It's now less than 100 days until our EDD for baby #3, but in reality it will probably be at least a week more than that until he/she makes their big entrance... 41 weeks seems to be the normal baby cooking time around here!  Having 2 small children already there isn't all that much to do in preparation for the arrival... we need to tidy out a corner of our bedroom for baby's things and I'd like to do a bit more general decluttering around the house and cook ahead some meals that we can eat in the early days but otherwise, we're pretty good.

The children delight, surprise and frustrate us every day :)  It's amazing the buttons a 3.5 year old can push... lots that yo u didn't realise you had.  Her questioning and logic skills are amazing though, she asks some fantastic questions and draws some brilliant conclusions on her own.  We are doing our very best to encourage and nurture this natural inquisitiveness but bedtime isn't the right time to be asking brilliant questions!

I'm also plugging away at my business, have had a few sales in the last fortnight so am desperately hoping that things will pick up from here, that would be great as we've invested quite a bit of money and many hours so far into setting up.  Obviously there are still so many things that need to be done but all baby steps.

The last thing I've been doing is knitting... I've rediscovered knitting over the last few months and have actually COMPLETED over 20 items... yes ok, they were all for children but still, that's a record for me. It means I've been spending less time on the computer and more time creating which is good for me :)  Knitting is definitely a separate, picture heavy post though, so watch out for a knitting post from me in the coming days.

Anyhow.... *waves, we are still here!!! :D

How many updates was I going to do this month?  Did I promise three or four?  It is now 11pm on March 31 so I guess I should get this one out there pretty quick!

Last week we signed the contract to build our new house!

Construction is due to start between April and June; the contracted end date is 1 May 2012.

As expected we will have bits and pieces left to do afterwards; the guest room, home theatre, storage room, and so on - but that's fine by us.  The upper level will be where we will be spending most of our time so that is the important bit for us.

The latest plans:

... and it has occurred to me that some people haven't seen the view from our block!  Apologies for the blurry panorama stitching issues!


Other random items of note...

- The geothermal heat pump came in at close to $100k... so it was swapped for a ducted electric heat pump... which came in at about $35k - it is now a $10k ceiling mounted unit for the main living area and panel heaters for other areas!

- Some windows have disappeared - the glazing came in at $30k more than expected.  Quite a few have gone (eagle eyes can check the plans!), this also helped to get our star rating up (it came in at 5.7 in the end ..)

What is annoying is that the modelling used to calculate star ratings can't "cope" with "different" houses. eg. our cladding will be alucobond/vitrobond. They don't have an equivalent in their system (does everything have to be brick or render???). Our windows on the first floor have a niche which runs all the way around 3 sides of the house - making the roof height at the edge and therefore window height 2990mm. The niche is only about 290mm x 290mm, big enough to fit a roller blind, so the height for the rest of the house is 2700mm (think of it like a giant sunken ceiling). The problem is the star calculations can't deal with that shape of room and must base the calculations on the entire house having 2990mm ceilings, that is a LOT more space to heat! So in practice our house will perform much better than the ratings say in theory.A little bit about the bathroom plans - the joinery details include: Square above bench sinks, mixer tapes coming from the wall; square ceiling mounted "rain head" shower heads; built in niches in showers for shampoo etc. Tiles are 600x600mm for floors, 600x300mm for walls. Colours can be changed but we have specified slate for now. The best bit - my cousin owns a bathroom superstore - so I'm getting all that stuff through him and supplying the builder/plumber :) Also, underfloor heating for the bathrooms has been estimated at about $1000 a bathroom - so we think we'll go for that.- Kitchen benchtop - polished concrete bench of that size was, again, going to cost too much, so the architect has changed to an Essastone bench with a finish that resembles polished concrete - at a significantly smaller cost, which we are very happy with!

- The Vitrabond cladding we will be using will be costing about $20k, but installation of it about $40k! That's someone's wages for the better part of a year! The builder is try to negotiate this down ...

- We have also received a copy of the building specification document - which is a 133 page document that specifies the quality expected of the builder on every single detail.. as an example, the dimensions of the doors, number of hinges, minimum sizes of hinges, etc. Includes which Australian Standards they comply to. This kind of thing for every component of the house! Not exactly interesting reading but will be useful!

March has started... you know what that means.. we have gone our first full calendar month without making a blog post since we started!  Ooops..

I told Emma that we had gone over a month without blogging and she keenly pointed out that technically that's not true, she has been blogging frequently on her business' blog at - http://wrapem.blogspot.com/

In an attempt to rectify this we will try to do one a week for the rest of the month!  A house update, a technology update (Sonos and FetchTV), I'll try and get Emma to do a sling or babywearing one, and of course some other news that most of you may know about already ;)

I guess I should do a wrap up of the year, similarly to the wrap up of the decade I wrote this time last year!

Hi everyone,
About time for an update! We had another meeting with the architect on December 22nd. Over the last few months he has been working with the engineer, drawing up structural, plumbing and electrical plans, and made a few minor changes to the floor plan to account for these. We also went through the glazing schedule, confirming the sizes and types of all the windows. We also met the builder for the first time!

Latest plan revisions:

There were another 20 or so diagrams/plans with these ones but I won't upload them all - things like updated elevation diagrams, subfloor plan, roof plan, and so on, I won't scan them all :)

Major changes:

- A niche running all the way around the top cornice area of 3 sides of the house - this was because the roof support structure needed a bit more space than what was available (and raising the roof level would have required going back to planning approval) so to keep window sizes the standard height they added a gap. This works out well because it provides a spot where blinds etc. can be installed and then be hidden when they are open - and also allows some niches to be built into some walls.

- Laundry chute location confirmed, after about 4 different options were attempted!

- AV/network cabinet location changed - made it bigger and placed it between the theatre and the garage. Discussions with many AV enthusiasts have let me to believe that cat5/6 will be used for AV in the future (there are adaptors to do so now) so as a result it made sense to consolidate the network and AV runs.

- A step before entering the garage - because the garage is 300mm higher than the rest of the lower floor. I think the step may get in the way a bit, so will raise some alternatives with the architect!
We've also confirmed some floor surfaces:

- Polished concrete in the downstairs hallway (as well as hopefully a polished concrete benchtop)

- Modwood for the decks - modwood is made of sawdust and recycled plastic milk bottles, doesn't require oiling every year or other maintenace, and doesn't splinter!
I've also done some sketchup mockups of some areas to give the architect and builder an idea of what we are after.
Kitchen:





(Appliances are Electrolux oven & induction cooktop, F&P fridge, Robinhood rangehood and Asko dishwasher)

Laundry:




And my work of art, the AV unit!


Construction is now expected to start in March 2011.. which means we may not be in there before Christmas 2011 as we had hoped, but that's ok, we'd rather it be done well than done quick!
 
That'll do for now, electrical and plumbing to come in a future update!

A year ago, Australia was the favoured nation to win the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup.  Two weeks ago, FIFA's technical reports said England, United States and Australia were the three bids best prepared and capable of hosting a World Cup - Russia and Qatar, the most high risk.  Yet, on Friday morning, Russia and Qatar were declared the winners, while England and Australia were eliminated in the first round of their respective votes.  What went wrong?

Frank Lowy stated that before the vote, they were confident that they had at least four votes in the first round - maybe as many as six - meaning at least three ExCo members had looked him in the eye and lied.  Even afterwards, two members have claimed responsibility for the single vote.  Who can he trust?

Clearly politics and backdoor deals played a role, but it isn't as simple as "whoever donates the most money gets my vote".  The voting pattern is a curious one:

The number of votes for Qatar and Japan actually decreased after the first round - leading to suggestions that some blocs of members planned to vote in pre-arranged ways in particular rounds, targetting individual nations one by one.  USA, Qatar and Australia were the only nations seen as the likely hosts of the event (not to say the other bids weren't good - but too soon after their 2002 hosting).  Australia was probably identified as the easiest of the three to "get rid of" early.

Now for a game of "what-if" ... notice how Japan had an extra vote in their first round as opposed to the second?  What if that vote was originally going to Australia but was "switched" to Japan just to knock Australia out, as it was deemed a bigger threat?  Japan and Australia would be locked 2-2 for last place, leading to a "knock-out" voting round between the two.

A poster on the FourFourTwo Australia forums, girtXc, appears to have some sort of insight into the workings of the FIFA ExCo and has posted an interesting theory.  Apparently when the Tahitian delegate Temurii (I'm going to assume people know all about that!) got suspended it had bigger ramifications than just losing a single vote.  His theory about the Japan vote is that powerful Qatari ExCo delegate (and Asian Football Confederation chief) Mohammad bin Hammam arranged it so that Japan wouldn't go out in the first round, therefore keeping Japan ExCo delegate Oguru's honour (very important in Japanese culture) and thus ensuring Japan's vote went to Qatar after Japan was knocked out.  Talk about swings and roundabouts!

The theories about how it happened can go on forever, and we may not ever know... but what happens from here, for Australia?

The sad thing about losing is that, as well as not hosting, it makes the moronic anti-sockah brigade in this nation think they have the right to spout rubbish about the sport.  Rebecca Wilson is already at it.  I won't go into detail about this one, if you read it, you know about it, and if you don't believe it happens I'm not going to change your mind.

The corruption has hit several major nations hard - the USA and England are even discussing a breakaway governing body to FIFA.  Australia could potentially be a part of this but we don't have the standing to do so - any form of dissent and the AFC - headed by bin Hammam (conflict of interest much?) - will send us back off to Oceania.

When will Australia get another chance?  The disappointing thing is that these opportunities come up so rarely for Australia.  FIFA has had vague continental rotation policies in the past - usually the rules are changed before a full cycle occurs.  With the 2018 and 2022 bid process, the rule was that once a continent hosted, they were not able to bid for the next two.  Although it is possible that this will change in the future, if it continues, then 2026 would likely go to the USA, and 2030 to Europe.  That puts Australia's next chance at 2034 at the earliest.

I will be 56 by then.  Frank Lowy would have well and truly fallen off his perch - he will be 104 if he makes it that far!

... and the big question is - will the government at the time support it?  We were lucky in that we had bipartisan support from Kevin Rudd (a "foreign affairs nerd prime minister") and Malcolm Turnbull.  It may not be that easy for a government to fork out $45m again, depending on the political landscape at the time.

But then again, in 1986, Melbourne unsuccessfully bid for the 1992 Olympics.  11 votes out of 85 in the first round.  Brisbane bid for the 1996 Olympics, 12 out of 86.  Imagine if those two experiences were derided as being "wastes of money" - it may have stopped the AOC supporting Sydney's bid for the 2000 Olympics - 30 votes out of 88 in the first round, defeating Beijing 45-43 in the final round, and going on to host the "Best Olympic Games ever!"

In the meantime, lets support the Socceroos at the 2011 AFC Asian Cup - strangely enough, hosted in Qatar in January - after all, it is the game on the pitch that matters!