Blag o' dkam

Sent an Email to Jenny Macklin — I wonder if I’ll get a reply?

Dear Minister,
I am writing to you to express my concern about recent coverage of Aboriginal health, education and welfare and to offer a simple suggestion which I believe will make a great difference in the race to improve quality of life and educational outcomes in Aboriginal communities.

I believe the introduction of school provided meals for breakfast and lunch, free of charge and of high quality, could go a long way to achieving several important outcomes:

• Improved health
• Improved school attendance
• Improved ability to concentrate, leading to better academic performance
• Exposing children to what should constitute a proper diet ( There is evidence that adult dietary patterns are learnt in childhood )
• Allowing parents to focus on self improvement, by needing to provide 10 fewer meals per week.
• Reducing financial load on families.

A recent article on Aboriginal welfare, highlighted nutrition as a key problem. Providing proper meals helps meet the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Once these basic needs are met, focus can be moved to other community problems.

Finland, consistently one of the highest performing countries in educational results has provided free school meals to everyone since 1948. A key point is that all students should be provided meals — providing meals to only those in dire need has a stigmatising effect.

This is by no means a complete solution, but could provide immediate improvement in quality of life for young Aborigines. Providing free meals to Aboriginal students could be considered as a pilot program, as it is my opinion that, in the future, all Australian schools should provide all students with a free lunch.

Best regards,
Dan Milne

Not sure why I didn’t sign up for this ages ago!

https://www.donotcall.gov.au/

Say goodbye to Telstra calling you up asking who your current provider is – well hopefully. Doesn’t stop market research unfortunately.

At the crossroads? lsdjf

Had dinner in St Kilda the other night — beautiful night.

I’ve just finished the biggest update to Booko since it went live. I never liked the fact that you had to wait for all the results to be found before displaying prices. Having each shop get updated was problematic as the end result wasn’t sorted by price. So I found a way to provide feedback while book sites are being searched and having the result sorted by price.

I’ve found a fixed a few bugs from the last release too around providing a link for the image in the search page.

So, go to town and let me know if you find any bugs. Any feature requests while I’m at it? I’m thinking of a personal list of viewed books or maybe a shopping cart type feature which calculates the cheapest place to buy all the books on your list – inclusive of shipping.

Well, it’s been a while, but it looks like someone (Tim you’re the only person who looks at cooking books) found a bug. Searching for a book which has an ISBN which is only available via Fishpond and not Amazon, means that you could find the book, but that it didn’t have a title, author or image. Well, I’ve fixed that now.

Also, you can now click on the book cover image to take you to the price lookup page.

Lastly, shipping price can now be more than just a single number – I can define rules for shipping. So, for example ( the only one I’ve found so far ) Fishpond have free shipping for books over $50 – this is now correctly accounted for.

It’s hard to not be impressed by this guy. I find it annoying that I care what happens in the US elections, but it affects us so strongly, and this guy says so much that makes sense.

Man I loved this game when I was a kid.

Looks like fewer people are wasting their lives in servitude to their religious beliefs. Sure, some of you are going to say that’s a bit harsh, but really. It’s the 21st century, enough already.

If you want to know what religious conversations sound like to an atheist, I thought of an interesting mental experiment you can try. Whenever you hear the name of a god you don’t believe in ( God, Jesus, Allah, Yahweh etc) substitute it with “Zeus”, and when you hear the name of a place you go when you die, replace it with “Valhalla”. It probably works better for a god you don’t believe in — the mental jump between a god you don’t believe in, and Zeus is no doubt much easier to jump.