May 9th, 2007

Well, the Australian federal budget was announced on Tuesday. I usually don’t pay much attention to it but one item mentioned in an [article](http://apcmag.com/6069/bland_budget_for_broadband_battlers) on the [apcmag.com](http://www.apcmag.com) website made me wonder.

>Barring the somewhat anticipated expansion of subsidies for solar power installations, the most technologically complex development in the entire budget seemed to be $20 million for an Australian Taxation Office software development project. For the 50% odd of Australians who already file electronically, the ATO will now offer pre-filled returns, complete with salary, benefit and health insurance information. Handy if you’re a standard salary earner, but hardly an earth-shattering development

$20 million for an Australian Taxation Office software development project that will offer pre-filled tax returns. $20 million dollars…. are they kidding?

The Australian Taxation Office has offered electronic returns for a few years now. It works really well under Windows but their solution for Mac users is to run it under Virtual PC. Considering the amount of cross platform solutions that are available these days, I find it extremely hard to swallow that they cannot offer a Mac native way of doing a tax return without having to use some kind of emulation / virtualisation solution.

I hope some of this $20 million will be used to address the current terrible solution for filing a tax return electronically. Changes are though that this $20 million project will be developed and released only to support Windows users.

I always do the survey each year after filing taxes about how useful (useless) the online system is for mac users. I always write constructive feedback about the many cross platform solutions that could be used to make the system useable for people on any computing platform. Who knows who actually gets the feedback and whether it’s actually read / passed on.

It’s a joke.

I brought a [Rubik's Cube](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubiks_cube) the other day when Melanie and I were wandering around Big W. I remember having a Rubik’s Cube as a kid and somehow the stickers got pulled off it and moved around (No doubt the same thing that happens to all Rubik’s Cubes given to young kids). When I was younger I never did get around to actually learning how to solve it so I figured I’d give it a try again.

There are heaps of sites on the internet giving step by step guides to solving it, there is also heaps of actual video tutorials about it. The best one I’ve found though seems to the the [one](http://www.rubiks.com/lvl3/index_lvl3.cfm?lan=eng&lvl1=commun&lvl2=cbegam&lvl3=compet) on the official [Rubik's site](http://www.rubiks.com/). It’s done by a guy who was the first to ever solve a Rubik’s Cude in under 2 mins while blind folded, I figure he knows what he is doing.

So yeah, I haven’t actually used a full tutorial or video yet to solve it. I kind of figured out the first two rows by myself but it gets hard after that.

The only major problem I’ve had so far is if I take longer then a few days to solve it, the “Rubiks Cube fairy” (Melanie) will use her online solving tutorial to solve it because it doesn’t look ‘pretty’ when unsolved. This of course is slowing my progress in learning to solve it but also helping me learn to solve the first parts as I need to keep redoing them.

I remember also having other Rubiks puzzles as a kid including the [clock](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Clock) and the [magic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Magic). I also remember a silver colour magic that I think had 4 rings, although I could be wrong.

On a related note, the [Rubiks Revolution](http://www.rubiksrevolution.com/) looks interesting.

Watched the movie ["Grimm Love"](http://imdb.com/title/tt0448400/) on the weekend which is based on the true story of [Armin Meiwes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Meiwes), a German man who killed and ate another man after advertising on the Internet. The Wikipedia article linked above details the exact circumstances and is not really for the squeamish.

I find true stories like this both incredibly interesting and also extremely shocking. The human mind is indeed a strange thing and knowing that people are capable of things like this is sends shivers down my spine. I guess the thing that I find most amazing was the fact that someone willingly agreed to be killed and eaten. You obviously can’t class this as ‘normal’ human behaviour, so what made these two people act the way they did?

It’s not really a movie I would recommend everyone to watch. I don’t really classify it as a ‘horror’ movie in the traditional sense. Watching this and knowing in the back of my mind that it actually happened made me more dumbfounded then anything. As the movie unravelled I found myself questioning the motivations of both people involved. Why would people do this?

Overall, an interesting watch. Not something I’m likely to watch again, but it got me thinking and I like that about movies.