Acccording to this article in the Guardian, Sandro Donati, a senior Italian Olympic official reckons that organised crime is heavily involved in the trafficking of performance enhancing drugs around Europe.

The police in Italy first started serious investigations in 2000 when they claimed to have smashed a big mafia operation to smuggle human growth hormone, anabolic steroids and EPO from Sicily to sports centres and laboratories across Italy.

During a nationwide operation they raided 65 houses, offices, laboratories, gyms and pharmacies and confiscated thousands of banned performance-enhancing drugs and instructions for athletes on how to administer them.

I wonder how long it will be before an athlete is made an offer he can’t refuse ;-)

I crawled out of bed at 6am yesterday morning to go watch Niall run his first marathon. Mayra collected me at 6.40 and we headed off towards Fox Studios to await his arrival. The point we’d chosen meant we’d see him at the 11km, 16km and 21km points of the race, allowing us to give plenty of encouragement. Mayra had missed the last three races he’d done for various reasons, so this time we were taking no chances, and ended up in place, banner at the ready with a good hour before he was due to pass us. The only other people around were police manning the road closures!

Niall duly arrived at the appointed time, looking quite relaxed and cheerful. He’d latched onto the 3:30 pace group, indicated by a guy carrying yellow balloons, and on the three occasions we saw him seemed to be quite comfortable with the pace. After leaving him at the halfway mark we headed back to the Junction and got the train in to the CBD to watch the finish on the Opera House forecourt. The run down Macquarie Street, with the Opera House gradually revealed as you get closer, is an attractive way to finish a marathon, though by that stage I doubt any runner really gives a toss about the view.

We got ourselves set up just after the finish line and were keeping an eye out for the yellow balloons, figuring that Niall wouldn’t be too far behind, but he must have picked up the pace since we’d last seen him as he beat the balloons, crossing the line in an unofficial time of 3:29:18. There’ll be a couple of seconds knocked off that too due to him not crossing the start line as soon as the gun sounded.

So, a pretty impressive first effort for a marathon. Check out the photos.

Update: His official time was 3:28:59.

Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne demolish intelligent design (ID) in a Guardian article.

Another article, from this weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald gets stuck into ID as well, ending with:

Nelson has said intelligent design should be available in schools because “it’s about choice”. That is postmodern rubbish. Schools are not about choice, they’re about discrimination, about using limited time and resources to teach children what our society regards as most important.

Our Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, was quoted in a newspaper article saying that he would have no problem if Intelligent Design was taught in schools alongside evolution. I thought the US was the only place where fundamentalist Christians held sway, but it looks like Australia is heading in that direction too!

Update: FSM Theory should be included too!

Here’s a screenshot of what iTunes picked out for me when I created a playlist and told it to select at random from the Rap genre:

It seems to just move sequentially between albums, picking a random number of songs from each, rather than truly picking at random from all songs in all albums. I was expecting to end up with a complete jumble of tunes in totally random order. Pretty crap really.

Got back from two weeks snowboarding in NZ last night. Lots of photos to organise, so will have an update ready to go soon. Managed to stack on the usual 2kg (!!) so will have to ramp up the exercise program again.

Read this quote today:

There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity. – Arthur Schopenhauer

The sad thing is that nowadays you can safely remove the ‘before the age of five’ requirement.

I’ve just had my first weekend snowboarding this season and it was great fun. Myself, Tom and Dave went down to Perisher for two days. Saturday was crystal clear skies and decent snow. Pretty hard packed with a bit of cover over the top. I managed to fall twice within 5 minutes of putting the board on, but after that it was all good and I was getting some nice fast carves in.

Dave’s a skiing novice, having only done one week in St. Anton last year, so we cruised around the easy slopes for most of the weekend, with Tom giving him tips and correcting mistakes. He made pretty rapid progress, such that we were coming down Interceptor by Sunday afternoon. He also signed up for a private lesson with Franz The Austrian yesterday which went really well, so he’ll be flying by the time we get abck down there on Friday.

This time I’ll take my new camera out and get some action shots. I decided to leave it in the hotel last weekend until I got my technique dialled in. No point falling over on the new camera all the time!

Oh yeah, got up this morning and got a weight session in too.

W: 1 session

Here’s an interview with Robert Pape, on the logic behind suicide bombings, as he has studied every suicide attack since the 80s.

TAC: If you were to break down causal factors, how much weight would you put on a cultural rejection of the West and how much weight on the presence of American troops on Muslim territory?

RP: The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.

Via: Schneier On Security

My old Canon Digital Ixus is great for point & shoot photos at parties, but not that great for scenic or actions shots, especially since it’s all automatic and you can’t change lenses, so I’ve wanted to get a digital SLR for a while now with the intention of learning how to take good photos. Jacqui has had a film SLR for a couple of years and I’ve played with that a little and got some reasonably good photos by trial and error, but it was time to get my own camera.

The first batch of cameras from Canon and Nikon were either too expensive (Nikon D70) or felt a bit flimsy (Canon 300D), so I’ve been watching what’s been happening as the updated models appeared. I was always going to buy either a Canon or Nikon, simply because they’re well respected and both have a massive range of lenses already available. Olympus & Pentax are making good DSLRs too, but just dont have the lens range & availability that the big two do. It came down to a choice between the Nikon D70s (updated D70), the Nikon D50 and the Canon 350D.

The D70s is a nice camera, though quite a bit larger than the Canon and more expensive. It’s got 6 megapixles, a good reputation, and while it gives away 2 megapixels to the Canon, its picture quality is on a par. However, Nikon’s lenses are usually an average of $150 more expensive than the equivalent Canon, and most independent reviews state that you can’t tell the difference between them, and in a few instances Canon’s are better.

The D50 is a smaller version of the D70s. Same pixel count & image processing pipeline, just a smaller camera with a few less features. One of the main negatives is that you can’t get a battery grip for it, as I wanted the option of being able to shoot using AA batteries in situations where I’m away from a power supply and taking lots of photos.

In the end I decided to buy a Canon 350D. Its build quality is much better than the 300D, it’s gone from 6.1 megapixels to 8, and the image processing chip has been upgraded to the same one as used by its more expensive big brother, the Canon 20D, which has an excellent reputation. It has the option of a battery grip, and Canon had just released a starter kit which included their EF-S 17-85mm lens, complete with image stabilisation for only slightly more than the Nikon D70s with stock lens, so it was a fairly easy decision in the end. I was also swayed a bit by the fact that Jacqui’s camera is also a Canon, so we could share any lenses we buy in the future.

I picked the camera up on Friday and have been playing with it a bit since then. There’s so much to learn though that it will take me ages to figure it all out. I took the camera out last night to Christine & Danny’s birthday, but it’s a bit too cumbersome for party shooting so I’ll stick to the Digital Ixus for that. However, I’m off snowboarding in NZ in a couple of weeks and the scenery there is fantastis, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some good shots there. It also means I can claim back the 10% GST on the camera.

Happy Shooting!

There’s a road rule here in Oz which states that if you’re parking by the side of the road, you must park your car in the same direction as the traffic. This makes sense on a busy road as you don’t want someone holding up traffic while they try to get to the far side of the road. On quiet, low traffic, residential streets, it’s not that important.

I woke up this morning to find some tosser from the council writing tickets for all the parked cars on our street which were not facing the correct way, one of which happened to be Jacqui’s. He had a police escort, no doubt wary of getting smacked upside the head by a grumpy resident who hadn’t yet had their civilising coffee. $125 per car, and I saw at least 10 cars with tickets.

The knowledge that I can go to sleep and have the local council stab me in the back as a revenue raising exercise overnight gives me a nice warm glow inside. Bastards.

I’m sitting in my apartment as the wind howls outside, and whitecaps adorn the sea, yet there’s an ice-cream truck outside with its jingles going. Somehow I doubt he’ll make much money today!

This is an example of what a shit piece of software Windows is. I fired up Virtual PC only to have one of those nagging dialogs that are so popular on Windows show up. This one informed me that there were ‘unused icons on my Desktop’. I discarded it, but in true Windows fashion it popped up again, 10 seconds later! Just fuck off and stop annoying me!

I decided to let it run, so it informed me that four icons on my desktop hadn’t been used in a few months and did I want to get rid of them. I elected to trash three of them and clicked OK. What did it do???? It just created a new fucking folder on my Desktop and moved the three icons into that.

What fucking genius in Microsoft decided that this was a critical piece of software to include in the operating system? Are Windows users too fucking stupid to use the delete key? Do they need a wizard to figure out how to get rid of stuff from their desktop?

PS: Can you tell this stuff gives me the shits? ;-)

Just heard that there’s just been a bomb scare around the corner from our office. The ‘all-clear’ had already been sounded by the time we found out about it. No reports of it on the news sites yet though.

From: Brad DeLong

That whenever any Form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations upon such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Hopefully they’ll get their shit together soon.

Here’s Hippy, Jacqui’s new cat. He’s 3yrs old, a bit fat but very friendly and easy-going. Every weekend the Sunday Telegraph selects an animal from the Animal Welfare League shelters and puts their picture in the paper, along with a brief description. This is how Jacqui met Hippy and it was love at first sight. His description said he was independent, loved nothing more than sitting on his arse in the sun (I’m paraphrasing a bit) and that he was perfect for people who’d be at work all day.

Jacqui wasn’t 100% certain that we should get a cat, so she decided to wait a week. Seven days later the paper revealed that no-one had taken Hippy, so we decided to visit the shelter the following weekend. When we got there he was just as advertised, lying in the sun! After a bit of familiarisation, Jacqui decided she’d take him, so here he is. He has been around for the last two weeks and has settled in perfectly. He doesn’t hassle the birds or the fish, but he does like staring at them. The birds seems to have adjusted to the new arrival as they’re back to chirping loudly.

Who shares your birthday? Check here

I’m in good company, with five Nobel Prize winners, two kings, 2 presidents, a dalai lama, the last Russian tsarina, Scott of the Antarctic and the guy who kicked off the Renaissance. Not badd, eh?

Bjorn Borg

K.F. Braun (shared 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics, radio)

E. Krebs (shared 1992 Nobel Prize for Medicine, reversible protein phosphor)

T. Mann (1925 Nobel Prize)

P. Sharp (1993 Nobel Prize for Medecine)

Heinrich Rohrer (shared 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics, electron microscope)

William T. Cosgrove (First Irish President)

Dalai Lama #14 (1935)

King Joseph of Portugal (1750)

King Joao III of Portugal (1521)

Donncha Redmond (Living Legend)

Regiomantus (reponsible for kicking off the Renaissance in Europe)

Robert F. Scott (of the Antarctic)

Sukarno (indonesia’s First President)

Diego Velazquez (Spanish Painter)

Alexandra Romanova (last Russian tsarina, murdered in Bolshevik Revolution)

Alexander Pushkin (Russian Poet)

The question on the DealMac forum: Have you ever caught a Mac virus?

Some long-time users can remember one around 1989-1991 (yes, that is 14 years ago!) but very little since. As for me, I can remember running Disinfectant back in 1990 and it finding the occasional problem, but nothing that caused me to lose any data. Since using OS X full-time since 2001 I haven’t had a single virus, trojan or piece of spyware.

Looks like the US Senate isn’t too pleased about George Galloway’s testimony. His is the only transcript missing from the Senate Committee’s web page, and he has apparently been edited from the video transcript as well??? Freedom and Democracy my arse!

You can watch the full video clip of his testimony here, as a Quicktime movie.