Archive for the 'The Mill' Category

Your travel survival plan - Part 2

Published
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Rhys
on October 11, 2008
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Moving alert readinessNow that you’ve organised your duress words it is important to consider what actions you want taken when a duress word is received. Finding the right balance between a simple phone call and declaring war against a foreign country can be difficult, but is an important step to get right. Aim too high and your safety line back home may be hesitant to act (in which case you need a better safety line), too low and you may be found too late lying in an icy bathtub sans two kidneys.

The action that you choose to take should take into account the possible situation that you are in. For instance, if you have agreed to call every 30 minutes and miss a call in, phoning back is not a useful safeguard if the battery in your phone has died. For this reason it can be beneficial to split communication methods so as to not allow for a single point of failure. For instance, you may choose to write three blog posts within 24 hours to inform your safety line that you are still alive (for now) and even give away information on your whereabouts (photographs are especially good, doubly if they include Geocodes). Unfortunately this mechanism is susceptible to attack, and could also become unavailable if the country you are visiting happens to ban your website (again a potential single point of failure). You may even be travelling in an area where they don’t have internet access or mobile phone coverage.

Depending on where you are travelling and how much you want to mitigate risk you may need to invest in a good satellite phone (or two), an EPIRB satellite beacon or simply forego the holiday and spend the time in your fallout shelter, shotgun in hand watching the door. You do have a fallout shelter, right?

Better yet, why not utilise the system that has been used throughout time and take a buddy with you. At least then if you both lose your kidneys you get a wonderful shared experience to end your vacation.

Your travel survival plan - Part 1

Published
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Rhys
on August 10, 2008
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Recently a close friend travelled to China for many weeks. Whilst I can’t think of a good reason to go to China for pleasure, he certainly has (I have heard something about some little sports competition they have going at the moment).

So, having now “hooked up” with someone he has has to turn back to his friends in Australia to perform a very important duty: “Keeping track of his kidneys”. Unfortunately this plan was enacted too late and didn’t have enough detail to properly react to this scenario. Fortunately he still claimed to have his Kidneys less than 24 hours ago, but I can’t be certain he has them at the time of writing.

Don’t think this is purely limited to the stealing of Kidneys. Other problems you need to keep aware of include:

  • Stealing other organs. Sure, kidneys are the main ones, but you’ve already crossed a line, so why not harvest some other organs while you are at it, such as your liver or corneas.
  • Kidnapping. Even if you don’t have anyone back home willing to fork out for your ransom, you may still be worth something to kidnappers who can send your bodyparts in the place of genuine kidnap victims in order to encourage the ransomee (is that even the right word? If not, it is now) to fork out the dough.
  • Slavery. Don’t underestimate your worth on the slave market.
  • Being accidentally married and thus being financially responsible for your new bride/groom’s entire family

So with all these things that can possibly go wrong who in their right mind would want to even travel overseas? I’ve heard culture and life experience are a couple of reasons.

So that you can continue having life experiences that don’t involve getting you addicted to drugs and becoming someone’s sex slave in their dungeon, you can arrange a plan to communicate your whereabouts and status to the outside world. Depending on the level of the problem, a quick call to the local embassy or a crack team of mercenaries will be ready to assist and extract you from any situation lickety split.

Unfortunately my friend consulted someone else to make these arrangements, who despite their many years of watching violent television and films has not been left as paranoid about how to prevent or deal with these situations as I. It’s important to take life lessons from movies.

The first and most important step is regular communication. How regular will be dependent on where you are going and what sort of access you have to communication equipment. Communication can be either one-way or two-way. If the communication is one-way you need to establish a protocol for verifying the validity of the communique and a plan if the communique is malformed. Most importantly is the need for a duress word. This word needs to be arranged in advance when their is a high degree of certainty that the person is not under duress.
Duress words

The best part about duress words is their ability to add extra meaning to your message. For this reason it is important to have more than one. Using these words you can communicate important information to give an approximate location, description of the problem and even a rough count of how large the team of mercenaries should be.

It is important that the duress words be able to be slotted in with your normal messages without arising suspicion. Poor choices of duress words include “help”, “I’m being kidnapped” and “get me the f@# out of here”.

Because the duress words are supposed to be so normal it is possible that a duress word may accidentally be used in a communique. That’s why it is important to have a procedure to follow when a duress word is received, a communique is late or malformed. Usually this procedure would have varying degrees of action as you increase your state of readiness. You can either use numbers or colours[1] (or a combination of the two) to help make it easy to determine where in the process you might be.

In my next post I’ll describe what steps to take as you move from one alert level to another.


  1. That’s right, colour is spelt with a “u” [back ↩]

Pitfalls of Proposing

Published
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Rhys
on May 27, 2008
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They say to “give the people what they want”. According to the stats, the fine people of the Internet want to hear what I have to say about such things as “When to Propose“. Despite the fact that the post is over two and a half years old and I remain as single today as I was then it is the number one post read on my blog. In fact, a quick Google search reveals that I am number 3 on the list when you search for “when to propose”. These posts have also seen the highest number of comments from people I don’t know.

This tells me three important things:

  1. I should write more posts about proposing, relationships, etc
  2. There must be a shortage of good information on the Internet about this topic
  3. The people of the Internet will listen to anyone for advice

With that out of the way, let’s start to explore this topic that the Internet seems to deem me an authority on, proposing.

I am a student of film and television (in the sense that I watch a lot of it). Most of what I’ve learnt about life I have picked up from movies and TV. Most importantly I have learnt that life is not at all like what I see on movies and television. There is no guarantee of a happy ending. Indeed, things don’t seem to quite end or wrap up nicely as they do on film. That’s why I like film and television. I watch it because it isn’t what I see around me every day, but I can still apply broad concepts.

Proposing is all about managing risk. Indeed, everything about life is about managing risk. Risk is what makes life enjoyable. Knowing the answer to every problem is not quite as gratifying as solving the problem.

So where was I? Right, proposing and risk. The trick I suppose to dealing with the risk of proposing is to break it down in to the factors that contribute most to the risk. By recognising these factors, it should become easier to pick the best time to propose, or even if you should.

Factors are likely to be different for each person, but it is probably best to look at the long term goals and aspirations of each side to see how well they combine. If sleeping with as many people as possible is your goal and your partner’s is to be involved in a committed monogamous relationship, perhaps your long term prospects aren’t tied well together. Similarly, if you are looking to travel and explore the world and you partner wants to settle down and start a family you might also be on the wrong track.

Ideally you want to find a partner whose life path travels parallel or intertwines with yours. There is obviously going to be some compromises along the way, but when one path winds to the left, so must the other for the relationship to continue. Of course, compromise has to go both ways.

Perhaps the hardest part of accepting the risk of proposing is to accept that there is no right answer to the question (the question being “will you marry me?” if you have lost track). A “no” can be a positive step as it may make it clearer that your paths are diverging. Similarly a “yes” may lead to further trouble down the road if those paths diverge.

But as I was saying earlier, the risks in life are what make it interesting. Importantly, these risks can come with great rewards. So if you are prepared and ready, take the plunge and best of luck to you.

China vs. Tibet

Published
by
Rhys
on April 13, 2008
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What the hell is going on in China? I have to give some kudos to Kevin Rudd for trying to voice concerns of human rights abuses in Tibet, but I can’t help feel it went down a little bit like a comedy duo with Rudd as the straight man. He tells China about Tibet and they just reply back saying “No human right abuses” (and then perhaps making some sort of noise with a horn). Somehow the straight man always restrains himself from slapping the funny man silly.

Several countries (Poland included) have enough balls to boycott the olympic games because of the problems. I wish we could do the same, but not because I think it would make China change their behaviour, but because it would at least affirm our true position.

Seriously, picking on monks? That’s just rough.

I don’t like conflict. I tend to avoid it in day to day life, but sometimes conflict is necessary to reach a resolution. If Tibet wants to be free I say let them be free and we should support them in any way necessary to achieve that freedom.

New Harry Potter Advertising Strategy?

Published
by
Rhys
on July 21, 2007
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OwlOn Thursday night my brother was the victim of what can only be a new strategy to advertise the final Harry Potter book, to be released today.

In true Harry Potter style, the owl (pictured left), swept into my brother’s room. I heard the commotion as Nathan shouted at the owl to get out of his room. Investigating, the owl was resting quietly in corner, but with some encouragement and the use of blanket (or possibly Invisibility Cloak), I was able to persuade the owl to leave the room through the open window.

This particular owl has been sitting outside my brother’s window for many months now. Is it merely a coincidence that the owl entered now? I think not.