Tuesday, August 22, 2006

1987-1988 Itinerary

click to enlarge
While tidying up looking for old stuff came across this itinerary. I still haven't worked out where all the old photos are though.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Mathematics

My eldest daughter recently competed in her first Westpac Mathematics competition late last month. Of course this is very exciting for me, as just recently, she had got 100% in a maths exam, putting her at the top of her class. She has since been put into the group A maths class, such that she is now studying with the other top maths students. The results for the WMC take forever to come back, but I was talking to her and I am not so sure she shares my excitement. She tells me that she actually hates maths classes, and the only reason she entered the maths competition was that she got to miss out on some other lessons she didn't like hmmm.. Anyway, I'm not going to get my hopes up too high. I am proud of her no matter her results. Next year all my kids will enter.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

What Australia Can do to progress the middle east situation

I promised I would actually put something down along these lines, but it is quite difficult to get all of my thoughts straight. So I'll try to put something in point form.

* As a small country, and not say the leader of the free world, it is not what we do per se that makes the most difference, but the example we display.

* Our actions around the Pacific are the main thrust of this. We have shown the right way to involve our military. We have made our forces extremely accessible in situations in the Solomons, East Timor, Bougainville, Aceh, Bali, PNG just to name a few, and most importantly, have not placed any conditions and have asked for practically nothing in return.

* In the Middle East, we have punched well above our weight. We were pretty much bound to act alongside the US for the most part, however. For a long time, we have had way less fatalities and accidents than the norm. Partly, this is because our forces tend to attract less attention, and they tend to be more specialised.

* Things like knowing Arabic language, being more disciplined than the Americans, showing compassion for the ordinary citizen rather than complete fear of everyone amongst them. These are attributes which would make a helpful example to others.