Today I am going into hospital for minor surgery, so I probably will not feel like blogging for about a week.

The thing about minor surgery is that the surgeons are always impatient to start stabbing something and invariably they do not wait for the local anaesthetic to take full effect. Sounds like fun doesn’t it?

I will try to write a few posts in advance and put my blog on autopilot, so I might blog, but I will not respond to any comments

See you post stab.

It really bugs me when I go to a blog and there seems to be absolutely no information about who the author is. I assume that others are bugged by this as well, so to eliminate this vexing problem I endeavour to tell you a little bit about myself.

I am a soon to be 32 (fuck that’s old) writer from Melbourne Australia. I have an identical twin named Nick who works with me in my business Constitution Computing.

Having an identical twin is a great thing as I am always guaranteed of having a best friend. Once you have a clone you will never be alone, as they say. It is also useful to have a genetically identical person around as a ready supply of spare parts. (He’s my personal organ bank. Ha Ha!)

My brother and I suffer from the genetic disease Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. DMD is a muscle wasting disease that causes extreme weakness. All my muscles still work it is just that they are very weak. It is a progressive disease, meaning at age zero there was nothing apparently wrong. Our mother began to suspect that something might be wrong at about age 3, but the doctors put it down to the fact that we were premature and twins. We were eventually diagnosed at age 7 and went into electric wheelchairs by the age of 10. Electric wheelchairs sound fun, but they don’t go down stairs to well.

My brother and I do not feel sorry for ourselves, as being an angry bitter cripple is not a fun way to live (although they are fun to tease (I am a cripple myself so it is okay)). It is important to remember that there is always someone worse off than you. For example somebody with motor neuron disease can end up not even being able to blink their eyelids. (This will never happen to my brother and I as in DMD small muscles such as in the face and hands are affected to a much lesser degree than larger muscles.)

For many years my brother and I ran a business, Constitution Computing, creating database driven websites for people and businesses. Anyone in business would know that working with customers can be a frustrating experience.

Last year we changed direction and started making websites for ourselves and (attempting) to make money through advertising instead of paying customers. My brother created PicsO – Awesome Pics which is a website that allows users to upload pictures and rate them. There are many other websites such as Facebook and Flickr that display pictures, but not many that allow users to rate them. This enables the best and most unique photos to bubble to the top.

PicsO is starting to take off with a large increase in the number of visitors.

Our other project is this website you are reading right now, Log My Blog. LMB collects and displays blogs in a similar manner to the way PicsO displays pictures. (In fact technically both sites are very similar.) Users can add to their blog and then other people can rate and comment on them.

My hobbies are playing computer games, bonsai and trying to create the perfect alcoholic beverage. My dream is to write a science fiction novel and get it published. I read a great deal of science fiction and fantasy. I like to watch science fiction movies, TV shows and a bit of Anime.

I am on the left of the political spectrum. I once considered myself a centrist, but now with the advent of the right-wing death beast and the, now destroyed, neoconservative pushed all other political positions to the left. I believe that capitalism combined with democracy is the best, if imperfect, governmental system developed so far.

Ideally, I believe in a free market, but I do believe it needs to be regulated to protect those at the bottom. I also believe in the welfare state and believe that health care should be available to anybody who needs it without sending them broke. Those who are disabled or otherwise disadvantaged should also be given the help to live a normal and productive life.

I believe the war on terror is a bit of a joke. Terrorists are criminals and should be treated as such. To call it a war is to give them way too much credit. I’m not a pacifist, but I believe that violence should be the absolute final alternative.

I am not the sort of person to take life seriously. I believe there are no boundaries when it comes to humour and I do not get offended easily. I do get offended by ignorance and stupidity and are particularly pissed off by those who do not know they are ignorant and/or stupid such as Andrew Bolt, Lord Monckton and David Irving.

I love a good argument. I am an atheist, but I do try to live by the golden rule: treat others the way you wish to be treated. I believe that everything has a rational scientific explanation even if we don’t know it yet. It also believe the scientific method is the greatest human achievement.

Hopefully, you now know a little bit about me.

Getting back to work and be a difficult thing especially when you are self-employed and work from home. Playing computer games all day can be a hard habit to break when your gaming machine is also the one you work on.

Over the Christmas break I downloaded many games using steam. Some of the deals on steam were so good that it was difficult not to just buy everything that caught the eye.

Someone bought me Dragon Age: Origins a great and somewhat addictive role-playing game. My brother has also been playing Crysis, which is still an amazing game after three years. Even on my brand-new beast of a machine it’s still will not run at full graphics.

There seem to be a hell of a lot of really simple games for under two dollars. I’ve been playing Osmos and Eufloria both simple mouse driven strategy games. Osmos is really quite a difficult game while Eufloria is a little easy at least up to the level I am on.

To Do

I’ve written a long to-do list of things to try and get more people to visit our websites PicsO and Log my Blog. Adding more content will be one of our highest priorities. We will be creating a YouTube video blogging and adding more features to the websites.

Now I have to stop talking about getting back in the worm and actually try to – it’s not pleasant.

* In reference to the Black Books episode where Bernard orders Manny to stop slacking off and to get ‘back in the worm’ – an old hot and stinky book worm suit.

Remember Red Alert and specifically the Soviet secret weapon the Iron Curtain? When activated, the Iron Curtain would make one of the Soviet buildings or units invulnerable for a short time.

Now the guys that invented the Internet, GPS and stealth technology DARPA has created a system that makes vehicles invulnerable to RPG fire. They have called it the Iron Curtain. Being nerds they couldn’t call it anything else.

When you ask a Liberal party politician, “Why did the party choose Tony Abbott as their leader?” they will tell you about the massive voter backlash against an ETS.

The problem for Tony Abbott is there is no backlash. The blog Pollytics published polls that show in every single demographic a majority of people support an ETS. Coalition politicians have been receiving massive amounts of e-mails and letters demanding that they vote no on the ETS, but these people only represent a very vocal minority.

If the Liberal party persist in their delusions… well there won’t be a Liberal party.

Over the past few days I have been reading a great book: Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson.

I have read quite a few books by Kim Stanley Robinson. Most people would know him by the Mars trilogy, Red, Green and Blue Mars. The books had amazing characters and ideas, but there were way too many words and I found them a bit boring. Icehenge and the Gold Coast suffered from similar problems. But Galileo’s Dream sucked me in from the first page.

Galileo’s dream is from an unnamed sub-genre of science fiction pioneered by the likes of Matthew Reilly (Contest: a group of many different alien races fighting to the death in New York City library) and Harry Turtledove (Worldwar Tetralogy: aliens invade in the middle of World War II). It is when an author thinks of an idea that sounds ridiculous and then makes an honest attempt to write the book.

In Galileo’s dream the world’s first scientist Galileo is visited by a mysterious stranger who transports him to an extraordinary future and then back to his own time. The book avoids paradoxes in a uniquely plausible fashion. Time travel has not been done better in fiction, although Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban comes close.

The best part of the book is the Galileo character himself. He is so real that you would swear that Kim Stanley Robinson has his own method of time travel. Robinson doesn’t shy away from showing the unsavoury side of Galileo.

The book provides an interesting and detailed insight into the historical context of Galileo’s conflict with the Catholic Church and his enemies.

From many perspectives this is a great book to read and I strongly advise you do.

I was forced to change browsers today and I am very angry. For many years I was a Mozilla man although it was known as Netscape then. Using dishonest means, such as not respecting standards splitting the Internet in two, Microsoft defeated Netscape and I was forced to become, much to my shame, an Explorer user.

Over the following years there was a continual battle between Internet Explorer and the other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera and Chrome. For much of that time the other browsers were better, but every now and then Internet Explorer would go back to the top – in my opinion anyway.

Earlier this month I got a new computer, a real beast running Windows 7. I downloaded Internet Explorer 8 and it has been crashing several times a day since I installed it. This morning I was trying to show somebody something on Google images and the browser crashed every time I tried to expand a picture. It was the last straw. Fuck Microsoft, fuck Bill Gates (although I do respect the fact that he does give a lot to charity) and fuck Internet Explorer.

Firefox is now my browser of choice – do not disappoint me.

I received an amusing spam e-mail yesterday fishing for me to buy extra domain names. I actually got sucked into it at first, but I soon realised that it was a scam. I thought it would be an amusing exercise to reply to it at face value.

Here is the e-mail:

To whom it may concern: 2009-11-19

We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,

Last week we received a formal application submited by Peter Lee who wanted to use the keyword “CHRISFRYER” to register the Internet Brand and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.

After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark. If you think that these domain names to be regisrated would produce possible dispute with you or effect your current businesss, you would contact us as soon as possible by Fax,Telephone or Email to protect and register related domains names , otherwise we have to approve his regisration application without your any reply in the next 5 working days.

Yours sincerely
Sunny

Checking Department

Sunny is in desperate need of a dictionary. Not only can’t he spell registration, I don’t think he understands the meaning of sincerely. I particularly liked the fictitious Mr Lee though. Here is my reply:

Hi Sunny,

Mr Lee can register as many Chris Fryer domain names as he wants to as long as he is aware that ChrisFryer.com belongs to me and if he wants it he will need to pay me extremely well.

I also *will not* buy other Chris Fryer domain names either now or into the future.

Thank you very much and give Mr Lee my best wishes,

Yours sincerely,
Chris Fryer

All jokes aside, this is a serious attempt to con me out of hundreds of dollars. These e-mail scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

Generally it can be safely assumed that any e-mail from a company you have never heard of or from a financial institution is an e-mail scam. A reputable bank will never send you an e-mail. If you’re unsure about an e-mail the safe thing to do is to delete it.

A rather brutal battle has recently erupted in the long-running blog war between the crikey Bloggs and Andrew Bolt.

I Love a good blog war particularly when they get nasty. Andrew Bolt like most loony right-wingers has a particularly thin-skin when it comes to anyone questioning his crazy theories.

The current battle started with Andrew Bolt’s November 17 post “ABC hires the man who bashed Howard with a stick” in which he whingers bitterly about the appointment of crikey editor Jonathan Green to ABCs online opinion section. His whining has got to be seen to be believed. He goes on to complain about crikey writers and commenters who have victimised him. One of his most amusing complaints was how one of the writers of crikey urged that bolt be “sodomised with a calculator”.

Crikey politics writer Possum Comitatus fired the second salvo and scored a direct hit with an hysterically funny article “Peak Wingnut” which will simply serve to stir Bolt up further. It was a champagne moment and will go down in blogging folklore. You must read this article.

A third salvo was fired by fellow crikey writer Tobias Ziegler who “cleared up a few things” highlighting the hypocrisy of Andrew Bolt’s arguments another direct hit was scored. Whilst not as funny as Possums perfectly executed victimisation is equally satisfying and definitely worth a read.

I will be following this war closely and am eagerly waiting for the next engagement.

I am man enough to admit that I am in fucked stupid.