Brooders.net

This is a bizarre contradiction to the “Fight Global warming : Become a Vegetarian” argument.

Apparently, Greenpeace urges kangaroo consumption to fight global warming.

Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham urged Aussies to substitute some red meat for roo to help reduce land clearing and the release of methane gas from flatulent cattle and sheep.

So, we tried it out (Well .. I found it and convinced Kath that buying this was a good idea).

and on the plate

The Good things about eating Kangaroo:

• Tastes Good
• Apparently, is better for the environment
• Lean meat - About 2% Fat
• Reasonably cheap - $13 Kg, compared to Rump steak at $19 (Supermarket prices)

I found this originally via sentient developments (who happens to be a vegetarian!) but also caught the eye of writer Warren Ellis in “Death to Skippy“.

I’ve had it in restaurants before, but this is my first time cooking it. All in all, it was good. I’ll do it again .. and feel good that I am eating healthier and saving the environment (Rampant justification?).

My wife and I attended our Neighbours Wake today.

What do you bring to a wake?
Especially when it’s at someones house (in this case, our Neighbours house).

Steve was a quirky guy. I mentioned before that he’d told me he was dying, and I didn’t know how to respond, other than “that sucks”.

He was a keen musician (drums), played in a band, so I figured taking beer was probably an ok way of turning up.

Let me tell you, it’s weird turning up to a wake .. not knowing any people, other than his brother (who lived with him), and another lady we’d only met once. 50 or so people .. it was just unusual. What do you have in common, a guy who’s just died.

Back to him being quirky .. we met a girl who’d flown in from Canberra for the wake and she also knew no-one. Aparrently, he rang her up a few months ago and said “I’m dying, what would you like?”

To throw me into a state of cognitive dissonance (i.e. Confusion) this is also the first non-religious someone’s died event I’ve gone to. It was drinks at someones house, with photos and discussions about him or whatever. There are no patterns I was used to. Just a whole lot of people who are know missing someone they knew.

So .. I am not sure I really understand what the protocol is now, but it seems a lot less formal than the whole church thing. People remember the person as they want to, with no reglious baggage other than your own.

Farewell Steve.

Following on from Security Consulting is corporate ’speed dating’, I’ll now pose the idea that:

A Security Consultant is a Corporate Nomad.

Possibly that’s any consultant .. but due to the short time frames of Application Security Testing, I think it’s more prevalent.

Having been in the new job 2.5 months, and people asking me do I enjoy it?, what’s it like? So my answer …

Yes, I really really like it. I’m like an observer. I turn up, plug in, start looking around. Pretend to be a bad guy, look for ways of getting around the system, without fear of being caught .. because I’ve been invited to look at it. You’re not their to make friends, just to do a job. There is something quite mercenary about it that I like.

The nomad part is more about not spending that much time in the office. Maybe a day a week. It’s mostly moving from one job to the next. It always amazes me when I’m at clients, there seem to be a lot of people thinking and tapping away at keyboards or chatting on the phone - who knows what they’re actually doing. Every so often I’m back in the office, actually seeing the people in my company. I do speak to, skype, IM and email them .. but somedays it does just feel like you’re doing your own thing.

On a tangental note, I think I will learn more about programming in the next 6 months, than I did in the last few years. Each application is different, the functionality (finance, investment, buying goods, selling goods, etc) and different user interfaces.

So .. for the moment, I am quite content as a high tech nomad.

Now, this is an interesting list of movies. Check out Top 50 Dystopian Movies of all time.

I found this through the Infocult feed. Bryan mentions:

It’s probably not a good sign that I’ve seen 45 of the 50.

A quick count has me at 28, with another 7 on my “to watch list”. I get the feeling he’s got a few years on me, hence why his tally is a touch higher. But I agree with the sentiment, not sure that’s a good sign either. Considering Blade Runner and Twelve Monkeys are two of my favourite movies. Perhaps it’s a latent fear that society is always capable of destroying itself.

Quite a few of these show up on SFAM’s Cyberpunk review, which isn’t a surprise as dystopia is a common theme.

( Via InfoCult Greatest Dystopian Films )