Those who are following the count closer than me: why all the consternation about the postal swings? Wasn’t that accounted for in the matched historic votes?

Old boss: Do you miss it? Me: No. Sort of. A bit.

Early voting for the 2025 Australian federal election still going gang-busters, substantially more votes than this time in previous elections.

Bit of a screed from me about how the website They Vote For You can mislead the voting public. It has a reputation for being non-partisan and fact-based. This is being misused by partisan campaigners to make misinformation for the middle class. patleslie.net/blogs/blog_t...

Line goes up – the early voting line, that is.

I’m not sure if anyone is still posting/cares about this stuff, but I dusted off my R skills and ran the early voting numbers for the 2025 Australian federal election. And yep, there are a lot of them – we may beat 2022 at this rate.

With a federal election on the way, my only voting advice is to give your first preference vote to a candidate you think will get less than four per cent of the vote, and save the tax payer $3.386 in public election funding.

Birthday boy – 13 today.

I don’t think AusPost will be texting from the Philippines (+63), but also the “you must have interacted with a sender before the link is clickable” thing is a smart and significant roadblock for these sorts of scams.

Anyone know why they’re apparently running a pipe under Lake Burley Griffin by the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge in Canberra? Is it a light rail thing?

The way that the ACT times its driver’s license expiry means that you can let people know you have a significant birthday coming up by saying you have to get your license renewed.

Was just shat on by a currawong.

As someone who drafts and deletes a lot more posts than I ever post, I love this idea – writing the posts in a notebook and not posting them at all. writingatlarge.com/2025/02/20/h...

Troublemakers.

Hey look, my old stomping ground. Perfect job for politics nerds (who don’t talk about politics on social media).

Now that I don’t subscribe to any streaming music services I only discover new music is out by serendipity, so happened to stumble across the fact yesterday that Lacuna Coil have just released a new album centurymedia.bandcamp.com/album/sleepl...

Irregular Canberra bus ticketing update: On the 182 and for most customers the credit card tap function isn’t working until the driver does something on his console. Weird.

Here be dragons.

Dog is currently demanding that everyone goes to bed because he is very tired (because we have had a visitor over during the day and he can’t relax when we have a visitor around).

When your regular coffee place has a new staff member and they ask how they can help you.

Resisting reading the actual political donations bill because it’s not something you’d do for free but can’t help but think that all the public/media analysis I’ve seen of it in the last few days feels pretty… crap?

Though anyone who comes near Musk is irrevocably tainted by association, Kill V. Maim somehow remains a banger.

I was early and the bus was early and now I’m about to be at work quite early.

Good day to post this, I guess. law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/asset...

The ABC News website has a sidebar for “World politics” and I read it as “Weird politics” and frankly my version fits better.

Partner, about to drill into the wall: There shouldn’t be a power cable there, should there? Me: I guess we’re about to find out.

A quick blog post on my updated Australian federal political donations #rstats package damonism.net/posts/ausvot...

Saddest part of a holiday: turning the morning alarm back on. The second saddest is when the alarm you have forgotten to turn off wakes you up on the first day of the holidays.

Research assistant position in my team in the Parliamentary Library www.apsjobs.gov.au/s/job-detail...

Reasonably accessible (sixish months old) article about the problems of modern polling. With a US focus, but generally applicable undark.org/2024/06/26/t...

A quick blog post on my updated Australian federal political donations #rstats package damonism.net/posts/ausvot...

Although I’m not working in the area any more, I spent my morning off dusting off my R package that provides all of the AEC’s annual political finance data. You can find it here: github.com/damonism/aus...

My 76-year-old mother is tech-savvy enough to use Photoshop and Lightroom, but last night her iPhone updated to iOS 18.3 and the first thing she asked me today is “where has all my email gone?” Thanks, Apple Intelligence.

Waiting at the bus stop before 7am, for my many and varied sins.

Used my day off to finish a book. One left in the series. I’ll miss it when it’s done.

One of my early jobs was in the Coroner’s office and if the corpse flower really smells like a corpse, I think I’ll give it a miss. I still very occasionally get olfactory flashbacks from those days.

Reading the Australian Standard for the safe use of cranes, hoists and winches (AS 2550.1), because it’s more enjoyable than the news at the moment.

Kind of hard not to doomscroll right now, tbh.

Thought something exciting had happened because the nearby outdoor seating was cordoned off with crime scene tape. Turns out the tape actually says “Caution Wet Paint”.

Canberra things: just passed a recently-landed hot air balloon.

One unexpected perk of going cold turkey on politics is no longer having Insiders dictate my Sunday morning breakfast timing.

Found out why my network wasn’t networking.

We have one of those you-beaut condenser clothes dryers, which is extremely energy efficient and absolutely useless when it comes to making clothes dry.

Was going to say “racing the storm home on the bus”, but really the bus is going its own way at its own pace and so is the storm and all I can do is cross my fingers and hope they don’t intersect.

The QR code reader thing is the worst aspect of the new Canberra bus ticket system. It’s slow and it it only works about 10 per cent of the time. Who thought this was a good idea? (Yes, this is now exclusively a Transport Canberra commentary account.)

I am on a Canberra electric bus and I miss the “bonk” noise they used to make at low speed. Also the card reader is working so I have to pay for my bus trip for the first time this year.

I think the apocalypse just arrived in Canberra.

Accidentally bought another keyboard. Decided my work keyboard has too many keys so I needed to get a new one (a wireless Cherry Corne, for anyone who speaks split keyboard).

There was a setting on Twitter where you could block seeing reposts by certain users (not that you wouldn’t see the user’s posts, but you wouldn’t see posts that a user retweeted). Does BlueSky have that? It should.

Just spent half an hour on the phone to get iiNet to refund the money they changed us after we cancelled our account. If you’re looking for an ISP, I’d recommend giving them a wide berth.