Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday said that only people suffering hallucinations believe it is possible to realize the dream of holding onto the greater Land of Israel, territories Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War.

An interesting little quote here from the besieged Israeli PM here; he knows that Israelis are increasingly keen to make peace with Hamas (a recent poll put the number of people willing to talk to the group’s leaders, in opposition to official Israeli and foreign government policy, at more than 60 per cent) and Syria (if his latest movements are any clue into his thoughts) and this is a way to show the world he’s willing, albeit not able.

Maybe that’s the optimist in me — the first PM since Rabin to really offer sometime real, and really want something. On the other hand, he has been up the proverbial creek lately without a paddle, so I guess in all likelihood he’s just trying to buy himself another couple of weeks.

Yeah, let’s be honest. The latter is far more likely.

But then, upon arrival at the airport, I’m informed my flight is further delayed and will be taking off at 5:30pm instead of the original 1:00pm. How frustrating!

Good on Qantas though for giving us some free meal vouchers for the being put out of place. At least I got a few bottles of water to keep my hydrated in the incredibly uncomfortable airport lounge. And $5/hour wireless Internet access.

It does make me wonder I pay more to fly Qantas; I mean, I’ve never had problems like this on Jetstar, Virgin or Tiger. Like I said, frustrating.

But now, I’m going to try and morph it into something else. I’ve just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1 (wow, by the way; aren’t the new features incredible?!) and have decided to at least think of aiming to publish more, probably around the vicinity of two-to-three posts a week. But on what, you may ask?

Well, it’s a great question. And I don’t really know the answer. I guess, though, you’ll have to tune in and find out.

Damn you, Centrelink.

Israel Beiteinu chairman MK Avigdor Lieberman swore to “rid the Knesset of all its Arab Factions” Monday, adding to the growing animosity between the two groups.

Remind me again how this guy was elected? Seriously…

I’m quite sceptical about the national apology, but that’s or another time. I understand that it’s now happened, and that’s that. Surely now we can move forward and get on with ploughing money into infrastructure that will lift Aborigines out of the dire situation that they’re in?

Apparently not. Darren Bloomfield was interviewed on Lateline last night. Here’s a quick excerpt:

So you know, the sorry for me is still water under the bridge. It’s not really good enough. It’s not, it sovereignty more than this, what we want. You know, sorry will come when the sovereignty issue is actually addressed, cause that just ties up everything … If (Prime Minister Kevin Rudd) comes up and says I am sorry fully to Australia for what happened with reparation and compensation to our people then mate he’s gold. Other than that he’s just another politician up there with another story to tell for another vote to get and we don’t need that. We’re sick of it. We’re tired of it. I’m tired. That’s why I come down here at the tent embassy. It’s the only life we have. It’s the only place we can get our lives back and we come here, we take the fight on and you know along the way I got my family.
(Emphasis mine.)

From what Mr Bloomfield here is saying is that once the Australian people have got their apology, they’re off. Off to secede and create their on nation-state with autonomy and sovereignty. Or will they still require public funding from Australia for hospitals, schools, roads and more?

Or perhaps I’ve just missed the point completely.

So here’s some unexpected news: the new Twenty20 tournament to be played in India from April, the Indian Premier League, will be broadcast live on Channel Ten in Australia. Wowee!

It was just announced on Ten’s Morning News, and has so far only appeared in one blog, but apparently every game will be televised live on Channel Ten (maybe even in HD?), with most games starting at 9:30pm, at the perfect time to space out in front of the tele late at night.

It’s very surprising that Channel Ten bid, and were successful, for the rights to the IPL. Usually the domain of Channel 9, and sometimes Channel 7 and the ABC in the free-to-air arena, and Fox Sports in Pay TV, my understanding is that Ten has never hosted any form of real cricket. (Are you really surprised that I’m not counting the sham that was the recent beach cricket series?)

59 matches over 44 days, great players from all around the world, including Warne, McGrath, Tendulkar, Gilchrist, Gayle and Akhtar, all live on free-to-air? Seriously, awesome.

Some people are being very creative:

“No, Microsoft, we need no assistance. Thx tho.”
Some rights reserved, ‘The Infamous Trench’, Flickr

While you would think there would be a pretty negative overall response from the blogosphere on this one, it isn’t actually the case. Techcrunch has been running a few ‘what if’ articles, most of them positive, or at least leaning towards positive. The plebs haven’t been as kind (as you can see from the Flickr pool), but I reckon it mightn’t be the end of the world.

Google needs a kick up the bum, to push it onwards and upwards. This could be the beginning of something new for them: competition.

I guess it will now be interesting to sit back and see what the American authorities, or more intriguing perhaps, the more conservative European Union, has to say about the merger. We’ll see.

Where’s the magnet?

Good question! Much to my dismay, even though the iMacs do come with an Apple Remote like every other Apple computer out there, they don’t seem to have a little magnetic strip on the side of them to hold it like the old iMacs. It very much disappointed me that they don’t come with what I thought was one of the most intuitive and most cool features of iMacs. Oh well, I guess sometimes we can’t have it all. I would though appreciate Apple taking my comments on board (yeah, right!) and going back to the old way in the next model. I guess we’ll wait and see.

The aluminum keyboard

A cool thing that I got out of my sister’s new iMac is her aluminium keyboard. For whatever reason, she decided that she didn’t like the new Apple keyboard and wanted the old white one I had. Why, I will never understand. But it does mean that my desk is even nicer now with the nice, new Apple keyboard.

(I much prefer the type of new keyboard Apple has made. I’ve been typing on laptops for about six or seven years now, and just prefer the way the keys are light on your fingers, and you don’t have to worry about ‘forcing’ a key in. And because I’m able to touch-type, I can just glide across the keys nicely, softly and elegantly. It’s just a delight to work on.)

Interestingly, I did have some trouble setting it up to work with my 2.2ghz Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. It seems that my System Preferences didn’t really like the new multimedia keys (previous; play/pause; next; mute; volume down; volume up), and also seemed to disagree with having any keys other than F3/F4 to use for Éxpose. Oh well. It seems to be happier after a fair bit of fiddling. Anyone else had similar problems?