Exaggeration I hear you say? Not really, lets look at it.

There is a little bit of "technology" called Google Analytics for example. It's free, it's used on a LOT of web sites, including all of mine. It's a traffic/statistical analyser for web sites. With the inclusion of a few lines of code in the master template (and therefore on every page), Google can see what, when and who visits every page on my site. But take this to the global perspective. Rough guess, I would think 25% of web sites probably use GA now. That means Google know about a quarter of the pages you visit. They know what you search for. They know the adverts you click on. They know they keywords and page descriptions of the sites you visit. If you use Google mapping products with your mobile, they know where you are. Have you got a Gmail account, well then they can read your emails, know your date of birth and gender, along with your mother's maiden name. The IP address you connect from at home gives away your location as well. They own YouTube, so they know the videos you watch. It is serious enough for Germany, as a country, to consider BANNING the use of Analytics.

This is a terrifying amount of information for one company to have access to, even if they promise not to misuse it and the above scenarios only cover about a third of their products. But what assurance have you really got that big brother isn't watching? What is to say it is not logged forever? Not that it matters that Google work out I like watching porn, that would come as no surprise to my friends, but still ...  ;-p

So what about Facebook? Who owns Facebook? Microsoft owns a slab, as does PayPal apparently. What does this mean? So now Microsoft have their Bing search engine, they have searching history for you perhaps? PayPal is used on many websites for payment processing - they know what you are buying. PayPal is also tied up with eBay from memory. Gets you thinking.

The big ticket item for me however is the advances in image processing technology. I would put money on it that within a year Facebook will have facial recognition software for auto-tagging of photos. Seems a cool idea until you realise that this can then be used to link you to who you "hang out" with as well. They can also add in something like Google Goggles to process your images and geo-tag them. So they will then know who you were with when you were at the Eiffel Tower (say), even randoms in the background.

The icing on the cake is the Australian Government's joke of an idea - the Clean Feed Internet filtering debacle. They are going to spend millions of dollars on something that won't make a difference, so they can get some headlines and suck up to some of the Independents. Glad to see my hard earned dollars at work guys. Top stuff. What has this got to do with privacy? At the moment, all web requests are fairly anonymous packets of data flying around, so far as the routers and ISP's are concerned. Yes, the traffic is analysed at the end points as mentioned above with Google Analytics, but the ISP's are a little more trusted in my opinion. This conversation doesn't include Telstra's implementation of a proxy for iPhone use, but that is another battle.

What the Government is planning to legislate, is to force ISP's to "analyse" my web traffic and decide if I am allowed to view it or not, based on some list. Ok, chances are if I am viewing something on this list, I probably shouldn't be, but that is not entirely my beef. This data will be logged! Sure as hell. So now Google knows what I'm viewing, the Government knows what I'm viewing, the ISP knows what I'm viewing. Where does it stop? What right to privacy and anonymity online have I got?

This is starting to get out of hand.

Processing and storage technologies are advancing so fast, that this data will be able to be stored, not just for a day, week or month, but in perpetuity. The business intelligence and data warehousing technologies are already there to analyse this for trends.

So now all of this data is out there about me - who is safeguarding it? What happens when, not if, my ISP gets hacked and the hacker gets access to the logs of my browsing history. They will know what bank I use for example. From query strings in the logs they will be able to work out far far too much. Query strings hold a lot of identifiers and account names for example.

Next Australia Post will have to open main to ensure it complies with our censorship laws!

Rant over. Time to unplug and get a place in the country  ;-p

Back in 1996 when I was knocking up my first web pages, life was simple. You had HTML 3.2, full stop. Then came along CSS and HTML 4. Ok - not too much to learn there. Add in VB Script for ASP pages, again, life is still pretty cruisey. Now?! Things are out of control. Microsoft are up to their 4th major version of .Net, then combine this with some of the other things I need to know: SQL 2008, ASP.Net MVC, Entity Framework, SOA architecture design, Azure, AJAX, Silverlight, WCF, WPF, Workflows, HTML5 .. the list goes on. Most of this stuff is still in beta for another few months, but the big problem is, most of it also completely changes how I need to write software going forward.

For example, up until a week ago I was getting ready to drop $100k on new servers, another $30k on fibre optic connections etc. Not a lot of point now, I can host the bulk the applications on the Azure cloud, maybe. Still learning what I can and can't do with this beast. So instead of dropping $5k a month on my own hosting platform, I can get it for about $250 a month. Sounds good to me.

But how to keep up the changing environment. I think I might crawl into a hole for a few years with what I know, actually deliver some applications, then worry about re-writing at the end. As it is, everything I've been working on for the last 4 years is looking like being remodelled so don't fall too far behind with where things will be in 5 years, and we haven't even finished it yet!

As for the getting serious part ... got a few big rides coming up. Noosa - 165km, Around the Bay - 250km, Brisse to Coast - 110km .... and the clincher - Canberra to Melbourne - 900km in November - and I'll be turning 36 on that ride - could be a large night. Time to do some bigger miles in the training over winter - happy times.

Dianna and I flew in Friday afternoon and was met at the airport by Phil and Dave. Headed back to Dave's place albeit briefly before we were off to the rugby. Reds were pounded, but the beer was cold, so not too many complaints from me.

Next morning, Dave and I headed off on the bikes. From South Perth we headed out to Freemantle. Some massive houses and spectalar river views in the early morning. Ride back up was solid but not too bad. All up it felt like about 65km or so I guess. Breakfast at Dave's place and then along with Dianna and Phil we headed off towards Freemantle. We hit the Maritime Museum, did the sub tour, lunch at Ciccerello's, beer at Little Creatures and then headed back to Perth for Dave's 40th. Happy Birthday to Dave. Good night, met a heap of new people etc, had some cake!

Monday morning, had a bit of work to do. Measured up a lease over at Midlands. Then Dianna and I headed south to Margaret River! Stopped in at the Busselton Jetty before arriving at the resort at Bunker Bay. The next couple of days were amazing. Cullen, Cape Leeuwin Light House, Leeuwin Estate, olive and chocolate factories, plenty of food and wine.

Sadly it's all over, but I wanted to ease back into it with a short day at work before heading to Straddie for Easter.

 So far I have managed to smash a few thousand pics in - check out the links from my other sites: www.rowingphotos.com and www.cyclingphotos.com.au.

Off to Perth this weekend for a friend's 40th - so plenty more hangover and news coming up!

Results were in line with expectations. I had hoped to race "C" grade, but they bumped me to "B" grade. Plan at this point was to hold on until the end, which is exactly what happened, so really I was just making up numbers. It was a bit windy and speeds were around the 48km/h mark the whole 50 mins, so the legs and lungs ended up getting a pretty solid session. Ned had a pretty solid outing though sitting with the break-away for most of the race.

Looks like another race this weekend too, this time out at Murrarie. Easier course I reckon, although with a minor increase in profile - Nundah is pretty much dead flat. Numbers will probably be down a touch on last weekend so it probably won't be as fast. Guess I will find out and hang on again. Hopefully get busy and whack a couple of pics in the gallery later this week.