Joelith's Journal

Pretty much everytime I walk through the city I am accosted by some random asking for money. "Man, spare change for the bus" (piss off you'll just spend it on grog). "Excuse me, can I borrow some money for food?" (despite the old man being morbidly obese). I am sick and tired of it. Just cause I live in the city doesn't mean I'll give you money! I work hard for every dollar I earn. Oh but you're a public servant, people say, you don't work at all. Except for the fact that I worked hard for 13 years in school and then spent another grueling 4 years at university. I lived on Youth Allowance for some of that time and that's only $440 a fortnight. Needless to say every dollar had to go far.

Meanwhilst these bums sit in the city and pester me for money. Get a job you lazy sod. I had one today (which is my I'm a little angry) that got angry at me since I cut him off mid sentence. "Oh don't worry about my pregnant girlfriend sitting here in the cold with no money to eat". Hey, I didn't get here pregnant and if I had a pregnant girlfriend then she certainly wouldn't be out on the street with my begging for money. She'd be at home resting!

It's not as though they have no money. They get centrelink and it's not my fault that they waste it on booze, drugs and gambling. And I'm probably sounding a bit harsh, but I give lots of money to charity plus I do lots of volunteer work. And I'd much rather give money to my selected charities then put in the hands of a drunk! Ugh so angry!!!

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Just saw an ad on TV by the Education Union criticising the Howard's government funding of schools. The ad says that government schools teach 70% of all Australian students (sounds plausible) but only receive 35% of the funding. Now this seems slightly out of whack and I was suspicious. So lets look at where they get those figures from.

The ad doesn't say what they base that figure on, so we have to guess. I went to this site and looked at the budget figures. The breakdown is as such:

Higher education funding : $8.3 billion
Australian government school funding: $9.7 billion
Indigenous education funding: $0.214 billion
Training (apprentices etc); $3.5 billion
Science and Innovation: $6.5 billion

Total: $28.2 billion

Australian government funding as a percentage of the total: 34.39%

So this appears to be how the ad come up with it's figure. Now this is a bit misleading, the ad implies that we need to give schools more than 35% of the funding since they teach most students. But they don't count University students, apprentices, science researchers etc. And it's not as if Labor is going to turn around and give 100% of the funds to schools at the cost of our unis and apprentices.

Now should schools get more funding? Yes of course, education is important but not at the cost of higher education. The ad should have said that the monetary figure should be increased and not the percentage. Ironic that the teachers union couldn't see the difference between percentages and numbers, or maybe that was the point.

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If you are using the Date.UTC() function in javascript be aware of 2 things

• It returns the time from 1/1/1970 in milliseconds. So if you are using PHP you need to divide by 1000. This isn't too bad but then
• When you pass the month parameter in you have to take off 1 as it counts January as 0 and June as 5 etc.

So for June 1 2007 you would do:
Date.UTC(2007,5,1)
How stupid is this! Who in their right mind decided that January would be 0. No other date function on other languages does this! And even though PHP counts arrays from [0] it still manages to make the month parameter start at 1.

This drove me insane for about 10 minutes so this should save others some time.

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For 5 weeks I've made up ideas. Some of them are crap, in fact most of them are, but the challenge has forced me to think and try to find out different ideas. It hasn't been easy and to be honest I'm kind of bored with it. I'll still try and post every week, but it'll be stuff I'm more interested in.

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