The State election is nearly upon us (Feb 26th) and I cannot help but be detatched from all the accompanying hoo-ha. From Colin Barnett’s hair-brained, unresearched and unjustified scheme to build a canal to bring water down to Perth from the Ord River, to Geoff Gallop’s same old same old… nothing changes and it all seems pretty irrelevant anyway.

The thing is, none of them have the guts to actually, fundamentally, change things to stop the erosion. I really don’t believe any of our politicians have the good of the State (or country, or whatever level of government they are meant to be representing) at heart. It’s all a power trip and a case of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. Actually, I think there are worse than Gallop. Yet, even a Premier with a genuine concern for the State is limited – as are chief executives of companies, for that matter – by their 3-year term. Goals are, necessarily, going to be short term to provide tangible, in-your-face results for voters (or shareholders) within that term of office if they want to keep their jobs.

And, at least with politicians, well… we know promises are made to be broken!

Nevertheless, we still have to choose who, as far as we can tell, will be the best leader, and as far as I’m concerned Barnett has just lost the plot. Hopefully we won’t get a chance to discover what other heights of stupidity he can reach. (The canal idea may or may not be stupid – what is stupid is that the plan is totally unresearched and uncosted and that Barnett thinks the voters are too stupid to know that.)

And maybe they are. I just hope Western Australian voters show more sense than the U.S. ones did recently. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Today I attended my first ever ladies workshop at Karen’s place – Mohegan Training Centre (MTC). It was hot, but Jade was wonderful and it was just sooooooooo good to get away from my puter for a few hours!

Jade had stayed at MTC overnight and had already established herself as Queen Bee. She wasn’t too keen on being caught, but was fairly half-hearted in her evasions and it didn’t take long to catch her, in the end.

She also didn’t want to stand still for me to mount when I first got on, but I just let her try to walk away with me hanging off her side and she realised her folly. Haha! After that, she was good as gold, a trouper, a legend! Though by the end, it was clear she was finding the heat and the exercise (and probably thirst) a burden. Not her fault, poor darling. Given that she hasn’t been ridden in a year, and barely at all in two years, I could not ask for a better horsey.

Her poor old mum (that’s me) had a harder time getting things right than Jade did. Jade has been taught by Karen and knows what she is doing. I have also been taught by Karen – but, having the fuzzy memory I do, didn’t know what I was doing. I was also *really* stiff and sore towards the end! Still, it was fun, and I learned stuff, and it was just so very good to get back in the saddle again after all this time…

… especially since (as I may possibly have mentioned) Jade is such a legend….

This is a nifty little tool I found when browsing Apple’s .Mac discussion groups a couple of days ago. It will turn any pic on your computer into a favicon for your website.

Online favicon generator

Sure, you first have to make sure the image is suitable to be scaled down to 16×16 pixels, but it beats buying an application just to save your favicon as a .ico file.

What’s a favicon, you say? It’s the little custom picture you sometimes see before the web site address in your browser’s address bar, or before the name of a bookmark in your browser’s bookmarks list. This little tool makes it possible for your website to have its own, personalised favicon.