Call me slow, but I didn’t know until I spotted the ribbon-sellers in Collins St this morning that it’s World AIDS Day today.

There are various causes out there with varying degrees of deservedness (is there a better word to use there?). Some of those that put highway collectors out on weekends in particular I’ve never heard of, and won’t give money to. They’re probably doing good work, but how do I know? My charity dollars go to proven “brands”.

And there are various adoptions of ribbons of various colours. There are so many now that I can’t remember what they’re all for. Yellow… white… blue… what are they again?

But the red ribbon of World AIDS Day is the memorable one, and definitely worthy. I’ve got a red ribbon. Have you?

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A couple of years ago I wrote a post encouraging people with blogs to make sure their RSS feeds were turned on. I thought I might just repeat it now. RSS helps people like me who have little time to go to one place to catch up on all the blogs we like to read (and might forget to check otherwise).

It’s also worth making sure that your RSS feed is providing full posts, rather than just excerpts. It helps readers see all of your post without having to click through to your site, not just the first sentence or two. I know some people like to get comments: for me, I’m more likely to comment if I can read the entire post quickly. If I’m only seeing excerpts, unless the first sentence grabs me I won’t bother.

(Some people — myself included — use Google Ads etc to try and get some dosh from visitors to the web site. It’s true that providing full feeds means some people won’t bother visiting the site, but but for me the ads aren’t a priority… anyway some claim that you do get more visitors overall.)

So unless there’s a good reason not to, do turn on your feeds. For those many people using Blogger, the instructions are here.

And if you want to try reading others’ blogs via feeds, try Google Reader or Bloglines. You can also get software to deliver those feeds onto your computer if you don’t like reading via web pages, or use the features in Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 or Safari to easily see which blogs have been updated.

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Forgot to post these photos from last weekend. Or was it the weekend before?

Footscray Road, Saturday afternoon, an important convoy came through. With escort cars, flashing lights, the full works.

They seemed to be heading west, last seen heading along Ballarat Road, rather than towards the North Pole. Maybe Santa’s got a local distribution centre somewhere out by the Ring Road?

I have a filing system which works well on computers, but is hopeless for real life. Everything goes into a big pile.

It’s the GMail principle. In GMail you archive everything in a big “pile”, then search for it later when you need to find it again.

On my work email, I now do the same thing. Once actioned, everything goes into an Inbox Archive in Outlook, then I use Windows Desktop Search to find things later. (My work email is where this has worked best; I’ve actually got my Inbox down to less than 15 items.)

In my home email, I do that too, but the email is in Thunderbird, and searching is using Google Desktop Search.

For my home paper correspondence, everything once actioned goes in a big pile. Uhhh okay, it’s not easy to find again. So about once a year I sort through it all and it gets filed (into smaller piles) or chucked in the recycling.

Even my laundry now goes into a big pile when dry. Once a week I sort through it all and file it. Finding stuff in there when it’s overdue for sorting isn’t easy, I must admit. There’s no Google Laundry Search available, dammit.

Final word for now about the election. There was much discussion with friends on Saturday about the perils of who to put last — particularly in the Senate, where every man and his dog was in the race, including parties nobody had ever heard of before. Do you put the racists last? Or the nutbags? (Nutbag racists are pretty much a shoe-in.) Or the Fundamentalists?

Inspection of the group voting tickets shows Socialist Equality Party didn’t preference Socialist Alliance. SPLITTERS!

And who are the Liberty and Democracy Party, anyway? For me that was answered by the Chaser, who noted that one of the LDP candidates was Lisa Milat, the sister-in-law of convicted serial Ivan Milat. The Chaser showed incredible footage of an ACA interview where she called for less gun control, and apparently didn’t know what euthanasia is. If I’m reading the results correctly, the she personally got no votes at all, though the LDP in the ACT got 402 — around a fifth of what each of the socialist groups got.

The aforementioned Neil Henry Smith got 307 votes, the least of any candidate in his seat.

So anyway, while the senate could take some time to sort out, the change from Coalition to Labor brought back memories of the last time it happened, in 1983. I was too young to vote back then, but my mum was overjoyed when Hawke won. And she decided to take down that amusing poster she had that said “God giveth and the government taketh away.”

I was pretty miffed about the last Federal election result, so I’m pretty pleased this time round. Now, if the ALP can just be reminded that funding public transport is in their policy platform (but alas not in their actual policies)…

I got my sausage at the polling place sausage sizzle, so I was happy.

There seemed to be a few wedding parties about during the afternoon. I guess they’d managed to find church halls that weren’t being used for polling. (One wedding party on the steps of St Paul’s in Bentleigh were memorably sipping from stubbies. Steeling the groom’s nerves perhaps?)

By 6:30pm we tuned into the ABC, but occasionally flicked over to 7 (Mel and Kochie), 9 (Laurie et al) and 10 (The Empire Strikes Back, which might have been an omen for some people).

Frankly I didn’t believe it when Stephen Smith from the ALP declared early on that he reckoned they’d gain 20 to 25 seats. He turned out to be right on the money.

Very funny moment when Kerry was talking about Maxine McKew and accidentally said “ABC gain” instead of “ALP gain”. Kerry also seemed to try to calm Antony down when his computer crashed, and started to get a bit hot under the collar when rowdy ALP supporters in the Tally Room started to get noisy.

Channel 7 was going overboard on the flashy graphics and that set of knick-knacks — what was that about? The little caricatures of Rudd and Howard as they showed the various seats. Not to be out-done, Channel 9 put MPs losing their seats through a little “Into the shredder” animation. This is why we tuned to the ABC… to avoid the ads and lame jokes… and indeed they won the ratings for the night.

Channel 7 did show us the grinning Peter Beattie and the very sad looking Joe Hockey during the PM’s concession speech though.

And so following his ascension to power, now the glorious prime ministership of the mighty Rudd begins. Kyoto ratification? Bring it on, Kevvy-baby!

“My father Sydney was a watchmaker from Nottingham, and my mother Verity was - well, she was a nurse, actually.” — John Smith/The Doctor, in the episode Human Nature, 2007.

For all you did, thank you, Verity.

…before election day. I really liked the Kevin Rudd interviewing himself clip, but I think I like this one even better. Very funny stuff.