Honestly, I have trouble filing this post under Entertainment because this show is such a long way from entertaining.

Despite the claims of it's many drooling fans, this is a pointless show that lampoons a subculture which doesn't actually exist here.  The cast (part of an incestuous little group of Aussie comics) have been using the same gags about moron middle-Australia for the last 20 years.  The comedy, if you can call it that, is based on such hilarious physical gags like food spilling out of people's mouths as they eat; the protagonist's inability to pronounce the same words she's been mangling for the last couple of decades, or my favourite: overweight middle-aged women showing thong.

This sort of thing gets old extremely quickly, and nothing is done to refresh the content.

It is beyond mindlessly repetitive, and it really saddens me that it has been picked up by a major commercial network, instead of remaining hidden where it belongs, amongst the cheap British imports on ABC.  Brits just love this crap, which is no surprise as they're still trying to top Benny Hill.

Any Americans reading this will be distressed to find that, despite a few setbacks, they may be getting their own version shortly.  I'm not sure you'll be able to appreciate just how awful ours is, unless you do as we've done -- don't just portray the rednecks (like My Name is Earl which is a good show), actually hire them as writers and cast members instead.  That ought to do it.

By stark contrast, this country actually has a lot of outstanding untapped talent in it's stand-up comics, some of whom can be seen on the first show to creatively capitalise on that in Australia:  Thank God You're Here.

Thank God someone's making good use of Australian comics on television!

For a long time now, American TV executives have cashed in on the quick wit and bankability of stand-up comics, and despite Australia being flushed with that kind of talent, nobody has yet deemed it a worthwhile risk to give one of them a sitcom.  We've produced a number of parody sketch shows like Fast Forward / Full Frontal (same thing), Comedy Inc, Real Stories, The Wedge etc, but until this, nothing that doesn't present as contrived and incredibly cheesy.  Nothing which puts forth a comic's best asset:  quick wit.

Thank God You're Here is an improv show that takes four comics and thrusts them each into a scene they're completely unaware of.  They're then forced to fend for themselves trying to be as funny as possible while constantly having the rug pulled out from under them by the show's regular ensemble comprising each scene.  The comics are dressed back-stage, but other than that generally have no idea who they are, or what their role is.  It's akin to waking up in a public place with amnesia and trying to be funny.

This format forces them to think on their feet, and really shows off their comedic talent.  The only other format I know of to test the acuity and professionalism of comics 'live' is the much-loved Whose Line is it Anyway.

I'm really happy that Australia has produced a show of this calibre, and I was even more chuffed when I heard of the US version, but unfortunately NBC didn't give it much of a chance, and cancelled the show after only 7 episodes.  The show is due to be franchised to the UK in the near future.

The last episode of the third season aired tonight on Network Ten.

Most people aren't particularly careful with their computers.  As a result quite a number of residential PCs are infected with virii, worms and spam relay agents.  In an effort to contain this malware, a number of ISPs have elected to prevent their customers from connecting to outbound mail services outside of the ISP's own network.

This probably isn't a big deal for most people, as the majority of ISP customers use the email account provided by their ISP, even though they probably shouldn't.  This only starts to become an issue if you're using an outside service to send your email, like a corporate mail account for work, or your own externally-hosted domain name.

Given the technical nature of this, most people tend to assume that there's something wrong with their email service, when in fact it's just their ISP being a responsible netizen and getting in the way of business.  I take a number of calls each week about this, so I figured I'd make a post and do my part to help people search for this information themselves.

If your ISP allows you to disable outbound port filtering for SMTP (Port 25) you can usually do so via the customer portal on their website.  I've provided a couple of links here to help people find their way, but if your Australian ISP isn't listed here and they do have a control panel for this, please let me know and I'll add the link.

Lastly, if you have some influence over the configuration of the external SMTP service you wish to connect to, you may want to suggest that an additional service running on port 2500 (in addition to 25) be implemented to allow users on the more draconian ISPs to connect.

I'm a tech-head, so I love upgrades particularly when they bring useful features.  For this reason, I'm taking a minute to upgrade to WordPress 2.3.  I can't say whether I'll be able to upgrade any further though, since I'm about to embark on some customisation here at ivovic.net.

Personal blogs are all about self-expression, so it's really almost impossible for me to restrain myself from hacking away at the incredibly hackable WordPress, and putting my personal stamp on things.  Unfortunately regular upgrades of the back-end software tend to work against that somewhat.

The authors have done a great job of allowing visual customisation without having to modify core files, but even so there are occasional updates which tend to break the theme-based layout, and there's only so much theme editing one wants to do in lieu of actually creating content for one's blog.

So, with version 2.3 we now have native tagging support and a feature I really love, which reduces the chance of 'not found' errors by creating automatic redirects to your post if you change the post slug (article link).  I think that'll do me for the foreseeable future... that is, until they decide to add something else I really like.

I'm 31. Omo I and Omo II were my high school classmates. I'm old enough to tell you how the universe was formed, but unfortunately too old to remember. I've had an Internet presence since driving across town with an envelope was faster than downloading a full-screen picture on a $600 modem. People used software named after a muppet to download girly pictures, long before the World Wide Web existed, and this is what hot graphics looked like:

Like today's kids, I was an Internet child, except back then actually understanding it was necessary in order to get anything done. As far as the Internet goes, I'm 'old-school' which means I've seen all the fads like 'AoL SpAeK!!!111eleven', 'l33t 5p34k', SMS shorthand like 'c u l8r' etc.

I've read all kinds of online bastardisations of language, but none of that prepared me for the sort of thing that's becoming common these days. While poking around YouTube, I found this comment posted by an 18 year old Australian girl:

i dont no why nobdoy likes her maybe because she is anoyning or maybe because she is weared she dont no how to act i dont no i think she is ugly cheerz

While I hate when SMS-speak passes through a full-size keyboard, there's still something remotely passable about shorthand... even if it is repugnant. What's got my undies in a bunch today though has nothing to do with shorthand, it has to do with a complete disregard for the language. This is a girl who is about to finish her last year of high school. How did she even get to her last year of high school? Here's something from her profile:

hey every one ma name is Jazmen am so into modeling and singing am perfect from many ways and who ever think am not they just crazy . love my friends an dlove my family any other i may not

am so into movies and music so far if u like to meet me or chat to me just msg me ok caio

It's not entirely her fault. What kind of education system allows this girl to progress, and what hope did she have when her parents can't even spell her name properly? This is altogether too many pet-peeves rolled into one illiterate young woman who thinks her supposed good looks and 'fuck you if you don't like it' attitude are enough to survive on.

She's 18 for crying out loud, not 8. This girl probably already has a licence to operate deadly machinery, but can't string a sentence together. She's no doubt getting as much dick as she can, but probably can't even spell 'pregnancy'. She'd do well to read a book (written by someone she might even recognise) called Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever.

I caught myself thinking about how limited her future would be, but then I realised the most depressing thing of all; she's not the minority. She'll find a passable job which may even involve having to write something, at a company staffed almost entirely by 'the illiterati'. Her boss will accept that sort of brain-dead drivel because that will be the baseline of the day. In fact, we're fast heading toward the time when literate people will have a glass ceiling placed above them by their degree-holding yet illiterate bosses who think those who speak and write properly are just elitist snobs.

The Internet hasn't made written communication any less important than it was 100 years ago - if anything it's more important than ever, given that people are instant-messaging their neighbours. Despite this, learning to read today involves not only developing a vocabulary, but also developing the skill to decipher the mess some idiots make of the words they try to use. If nobody can spell, then everyone's spelling differently, which means they're relying on their dubious intelligence to make any bloody sense of what's being said!

Eventually the written word will become useless as people misspell words which don't exist, but are nevertheless in use, like the one in my previous post. The Internet can't decide if it's 'hizzy' or 'heezy' when in reality it's neither!

All I can hope for is that by the time the written word is forgotten, at least kids have learned to draw. Perhaps the few of us left who still enjoy learning things should just write some cave drawing software for them to illegally download and install on their mobile phones.