Occupy Brisbane

The ‘occupy movement’ reached all the way down here to the antipodes, a long way from New York and it is unclear exactly what they hoped to achieve in this little country town. What they DID achieve was damaging the grassed area of city hall, with a bill to the taxpayers of an estimated $30,000. Some recursion there – where the taxpayer gets screwed picking up the bill for the damage caused by people protesting the taxpayer getting screwed. I would protest against the protesters except I’m too busy working to try and pay the bills and tax.

I haven’t seen the damage yet, but I suppose it is minimal – the local council here always looks for a way to give pork barrel contracts to their friends … like the $385 they want to charge for removing a small sapling blocking our new driveway which would take me all of two minutes to chop down myself except they won’t let me.

A few days ago outside our house we got a strange graffiti in the form of a Vendetta mask image spray painted onto a power pole. We saw them do it and were a little disturbed because it really looked like some kind of ‘death marker’. I still hope it was part of the Occupy Brisbane movement and not some secretive cultist symbol. Curiously the image has now disappeared – my assumption is the local police caught up with the vigilantes, charged them with graffiti and forced them to remove the images (which I assume were widespread, otherwise what was the point?). To all you 'occupy Australia' people planning your next series of brilliant moves, please keep off the grass. I'm still unsure about Brisbane's contribution to the global ponzi. And I still think the best form of protesting the system, is to possess physical gold :)

Good progress with the data routines – the download/extract/database load/cloud archive is now fully automatic. I am currently designing the unified serial bar number – i.e. a common unique key for all bars both silver and gold.