Here's a random sampling from the "images related to Colonpipe.com" folder I've accumulated over the years. Some of these are funny, some are just plain sad, some are interesting. Well, maybe one of them is interesting. Which one? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. Hit the jump for the gallery. Is it worth it? Your mileage may vary.
Continuing a very old series of comic book back cover adverts, here's one of my favourites: He's The Power Lord.
What's a Power Lord? I have no idea. I've never heard of them. I can surmise, though, based on what I see before me.
A Power Lord appears to be a man with the face of Bruce Campbell, who mutates (with considerable pain, judging by the stop-motion throes he appears to be flailing through) into a red and blue man with a Cardassian forehead and massive scratches from what I assume to be a lion. Or a tiger. Or perhaps a liger, even.
There seem to be a bunch of Power Lords. One of them is a bandy-legged dinosaur. Another appears to be the inspiration for the grunts from Halo.
In reality (or rather, after having done some research), I can tell you that the Power Lords were an action figure range (really?) from 1983, and the dude pictured above is Lord Adam Power. He carries the Power Jewel (ostensibly the rock wedged in his forehead) and a laser rifle.
The others have amazingly embarrasing names, from "Disguyzor: The Deadly Deceiver" to "Ggripptogg", who lacks a byline, but I believe if he had one, it would be "the spelling error".
Here's the Wikipedia article, so you can read up on the Power Lords, Adam, Disguyzor, Ggripptogg and my personal favourite: Drrench, from the planet Frigidor.
The '80s were awesome. You really can't make this crap up.
Follow up: jesus christ they're releasing new ones
Here I am, back in the late '90s, critcising Apple in MacFormat magazine's letters section:
Incidentally, at some point in the past couple of decades, they fixed both of those pronunciation problems. I'd like to think I had a part in that. I'm an alpha-tester from way back.
In case you've ever wondered, here's the history of colonpipe.com, in convenient image format. This should answer a bunch of questions you didn't know you wanted to ask, including: - Has Russ ever had good design abilities? (Hint: no) - Has the website ever contained good, quality content? (Hint: no) - How many php-based randomising scripts can one actually use to create the illusion of a dynamic, interesting website? (Hint: all of them)
Many of the images below are from archive.org's Wayback Machine, which seems intent on preserving every embarrassing thing the internet has ever done.
Hit the jump to explore the history of a website that probably shouldn't be recorded --
Dark Spark: 2001.
I'm afraid this is all that's left of my original website, from circa 2000-ish. I recall it had some kind of funky background behind it, and a banner/side menu combination that somehow fit together. It looks like archive.org didn't care to archive those images or files.
I believe the quote from Mark Twain, top right, obscured by white text on white thanks to the absent background images, was "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt".
Back then, my website was called "Datazoid's Reality", and was hosted on webspace provided by my dial-up internet provider. This was a big deal in 2000, though.
For some reason, I felt that my website needed an all-genre-encompassing science fiction introductory passage, it appears.
Design wise, I have noticed: - I haven't yet learned the value of CSS, particularly for taking the damned underlines away from links once in a while. - I've actually used "valign="middle"" on the little red triangle bullets to center them. Not bad. - I remember making the little "Made with Macintosh" .gif, and thinking that it looked cool all desaturated like that. - The little gold balls that bullet-point the articles are actually rendered images, I made them in some dodgy 3D program. This was a big deal in 2000.
Other things: - I had a Global Freeway e-mail address. Global Freeway was a "free" internet provider that served you with a little application that would pop banner ads up on your screen. They never claimed to provide service for Macintosh computers, but I was pretty delighted to get my installation CD in the mail and discover that just inputting the login details was enough to give a Mac user internet access. Really bad, unreliable internet access, at that. But internet access. And without the ads, to boot. - "See y'all around"? When did I move to Texas? - I believe Josh sent me the scan of the ant farm keyring. - Guestbooks. I remember those. Good lord. The dark ages. - The block of grey crap that looks like an un-loaded image in the top left corner is actually a bunch of letters that spell out "D A T A Z O I D" and would dangle beneath your mouse pointer, in a way that couldn't possibly annoy anyone, ever. Thanks to the cleansing power of the modern internet, they now do nothing. (Either that, or archive.org doesn't archive extremely questionable Javascripts.)
What The Hell Is This: 2002.
This one didn't last long. Unfortunately, the colour scheme must have stuck in my head, because it'll come back to bite me later on in this article.
Same website as above, ultimately, but with a spectacularly bland colour scheme and very little graphic elements. Maybe it was ahead of its time. (Maybe it wasn't.)
Dot Com Boom: 2003.
In 2003, I splurged on a domain name (or two). At this particular time, I was using data-zoid.com, after I was thwarted from "datazoid.com" by a legitimate business in California.
All good websites in the early noughties required a splash screen -- something we wouldn't dare think about anymore. This particular one, which I believe has had its html slightly cocked up as the giant "Z" should fill the white (blue?) space to the right of the various logos, resulting in a much shorter window, graced the entrance to the dot com.
The departments on the left were largely other people to whom I farmed out some webspace, in this case it was Mike, Chris, Derek and the old Rafters forum. Clicking the giant "Z" logo brought you to...
..the website proper. I believe that I either had a very badly calibrated monitor, or zero understanding of contrast. Possibly both. Some of the images have disappeared from this, resulting in the little end caps from the menu titles turning into white boxes. Oops.
Turquoise and gold was probably not the wisest of all colour choices.
Not sure why I included the standard HTML-include date and time at the top. Looks kinda cool, though, I suppose. Also, pageview counter. Who uses those anymore? Who cares about those anymore?
At some point in 2003, I changed the colours. In hindsight, it was for the best. In hindsight, it's still horrible, with a capital "HORR".
What we're looking at here, is the result of a man who just purchased Photoshop. The gradients, bevel-and-embosses, drop shadows and strokes on the title banner alone should be enough to make me take this image, snap it into quarters and flush it. Repeatedly.
Regardless, it's history, and I can't erase it from archive.org. It's essentially the same design as above, having gained a left column of information, no splash screen because the sub-site buttons are now below the banner, and a colour scheme that I cannot recall the inspiration for but suspect perhaps it started with "Tel" and ended in "stra".
It kind of grows on you.
The Prior Art-O-Matic still exists, by the by.
Now We're Getting Somewhere: 2003.
Finally, towards the end of 2003, I made something work. Contrast adjusted! Colours palatable! Overly complex use of tables to create a html layout, achieved!
This is probably my favourite "look" for colonpipe.com. At some point, I changed the link colours from green to blue, but all in all, it's workable. I've actually re-used the little graphics for "post" and "comment" from this layout (albeit enlarged to 200%).
The colonpipe graphic in the logo was designed by fraxyl, and has been used pretty extensively since this design.
This appears to be the point in time when I began my obsession with 88x31 web buttons, thus explaining the army of them in the right-hand column.
This was also when I began experimenting with using a php-based random generator. The quote in the top bar was generated from a file of some 1,800 short quotes I'd collected from specific people on internet forums. Primarily Chris. The one displayed here is most definitely one of his.
"The Random News" used a half-dozen randomisers to generate parts of each paragraph, creating a similarly-constructed but esoterically madlibbed news article each time the page was refreshed.
Also, 99% of my updates back then related to searchstrings and the site's statistics. I was either destined to bore the sweet bejeezus out of every single one of my visitors, or I'd accidentally stumbled upon creating the most meta website in existence.
It's Got Nothing To Do With Your Bumhole: 2010.
Prior to this design, there was another Wordpress-based appearance. Unfortunately, I've lost all record of it. It was white, and that's about where my memory of it chooses to erase itself. I can only imagine it was horrible, and the less we speak about it, the better. Even archive.org didn't care to record much about it, and doesn't have the CSS sheet saved. Oh, well.
This is the first colonpipe design since I actually started to take some pride in my work as a designer, and I believe it shows. The title graphic (still in use today, in some capacity) was properly rendered, and I put considerable effort into making the typography both appropriate and pretty sexy-looking. (Well, sexy for Arial Rounded, anyway. You can only expect so much.)
Content-wise, I'd boiled the entire site down to be a "best of" compilation of what had come before. This is about the point at which I realised that what had come before was largely filler, and that there was very little of colonpipe.com of which I was actually proud, and a stonkingly massive amount of it of which I was both embarrassed and terrified, to the point that I found myself retreating to a corner with the longest broom I could find, poking ineffectually at it when it drew near.
The Red Curtains: 2012.
Not a new design in itself, this one was just a swap-out of the background graphic. I decided -- for some reason -- to replace the stars and galaxy with a red curtain. Perhaps it lent an austere air of comedy club, suggesting wit of the calibre of Jerry Seinfeld or Larry the Cable Guy. Or perhaps it didn't. Either way, it was not to last long.
Pixelpipe: 2013.
There's every probablity that you're looking at this design right now. However, if it's in the future, maybe you're not. Or maybe you are. Or...who knows. At any rate, this is the design of the site at time of writing. You can see the graphics for "post" and "comments" borrowed from the earlier design. You can see the bars of social media share buttons that I loathe, but tolerate for their expected necessity. You can also see a tagline that I'm actually pretty happy with. (At least it doesn't use the word "bumhole", which has to make it better, right?)
Thanks for sticking around.
Here's a little fact I wasn't aware of, brought to you by the always educational Doctor Karl: The music on that annoying "You wouldn't steal a car.." bumper on the beginning of almost every DVD in the early '00s is...wait for it...pirated music. Dr. Kruszelnicki has provided much more information than I ever could, so I point you to the above link and leave you in peace. Should you not remember the horrid advert, here's a youtube link to refresh your memory.
Just passed 260,000 collective views between Heroes of Science Action Figures and Heroes of Science Volumes I and II on DeviantART. That's a bit nuts.
I'm not alone: Twitterer @durrak is also a Sanyo CX 2630 user, and confirms that all calculators of that model are possessed by demons. (Based on a sample size of two, but who's counting?)
This is a project that I started -- and kind of abandoned -- several years ago. The story is this: Once, during a trip to Melbourne, I picked up a cool poster showing the entire railway network of the city, complete with all of the stations and lines that had closed down over the years. I quite liked it. I decided to make one for Sydney. I stupidly underestimated the magnitude of this task.
So, I edited it, on-again-off-again, until I ended up with the final version, which I display here. Is it 100% accurate? Probably not. Is it educational? Undoubtedly. Should you always do further research when presented with information on the internet? Of course you should.
Thanks to all the folks at railpage.com.au's forums who helped all those years ago, without your assistance, I would never have had the impetus to continue with this thing. Thanks also to nswrail.net for being such a ludicrously awesome resource for New South Wales railway history, and a fantastic tool for clarifying a lot of the details that went into this map.
If you find any glaring errors, by all means, let me know. I probably won't make any changes, though, because this project has very much been and gone, and it's a huge undertaking to edit it.
Click here for the full, high-res (but heavily compressed) version if you want to read the text. (Warning: is gigantic, won't work in full-resolution on an iPad or iPhone without special software.)
Who's been dancing, lewdy-style, on the tiny stage, before the dimming footlights of your mind, this week, pal? Who'd have thought there'd be more fake action figures? This time, it's Roy & H.G, from "Club Buggery", "The Bughouse", "The Dream", "This Sporting Life", and a crudload of other things.
Based on the same Star Trek: DS9 action figures as last time. Click on the image below to embiggen, if that's the kind of thing you want to do.
Remember when you were cool because you used Dogpile instead of Altavista? Yeah, neither do I.
Wondering as I walked to my car today -- why does the traffic island on a four-lane road, with no traffic lights at the intersection, have "Braille trail"-style textured padding on the ground? What do the blind people do, listen for vehicles and hope they don't get creamed by a Prius?
Continuing the previous post's somewhat trendy trend:
Details: "Fire and Ice: Outrider", by Richard Harding -- currently selling new for a thrify $118.76 on the 'zon, even.
What is there to work with: Fonzie, portrayed by the bastard son of Peter Weller and Nicholas Cage, stands around in a field of polyethylene tanks leaking sunset into the sky. He has a large knife, a spare large knife, a small knife, and no knees.
Therefore the plot must be: Unable to sell functioning water tanks to farmers, Fonzie must resort to knife sales. Brandishing his entire stock of three, he shows up on the doorsteps of unsuspecting citizens to stand boredly askance, hoping someone will show enough interest in his knives that he can break out the extra special gift -- a free set of steak knifes.
Hit the jump for more, believe it or not, it gets better.
Details: "Ben Bova presents Phylum Monsters" by Hayford Peirce. Oh, yes. It's spelled "Peirce". My spellchecker hates it, too. Phylum, by the by, is the taxonomic rank that resides between "class" and "kingdom" in the taxonomic heirarchy. Likelihood of this being in any way relevant to the plot -- slim to none.
What we have to work with: Narcoleptic alcoholic butler holding a kidney takes a tipple in a room with a backwards computer with no screen, a yellow machine from Starfleet that has an LED desk lamp attached and probably goes "ping", while a hovering volleyball projects a hologram of a snoozing Doctor Zaius into the air in front of a pennant of the DNA double helix. There are SO MANY science fiction concepts crammed into this image. There's no possible way this could end badly.
Therefore the plot must be: Unable to maintain a train of thought while writing the sequel to the prequel to the third sequel of Planet of the Apes, Jeeves takes a brief respite in the DNA room. Sipping his chardonnay and gripping an authentic replica of a human internal organ, he hopes that turning his screen to the ether and listening to the dulcet tones of the yellow machine box will clear his mind and allow him to figure out the final character arc of Doctor Zaius, last seen sleeping in an extremely yellow room with inexplicable giant hairs growing from his left shoulder. Will Jeeves complete the screenplay in time? Will the studios buy it? Will Zaius ever wake up? Did Hayford Peirce spell his name wrong on the first book he ever published, and has had to live with it ever since? Is Ben Bova glad no one's spelled his name wrong? I imagine so!
There're still more to come (alas). Stay tuned!
I need to quit spontaneously spending money on things I don't need. Case in point: I recently bought a bunch (and by "a bunch", I mean 300) old science fiction novels, second hand, in differing states of disrepair. Some of them are recognisable, most of them aren't. Most of them are actually components of series' of novels, never with their appropriate predecessors and successors, thus making them largely pointless to read. I'm impressed, though, by the cover art on some of the "pulpier" novels, so I'm going to feature (read: mock) it here. In fact, the artwork reminds me to plug Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's old Cowboy Comics, which are still hilarious. I've included Amazon links where I'm able to, in case you feel the need to support the authors and cover artists by buying their splendid work.
I'm going to present these in the following scenario:
The logical follow up point would be "and how accurate were those conclusions?", but quite frankly, the likelihood of having time (or willpower) to read these books is insignificantly low.
The books!
Details: "Nowhere Man" by Jerry Oster, 1989
What is there to work with: Either a ninja, or a man in a wetsuit. He's armed with a 9mm. He looks depressed. The novel is a humdinger.
Therefore the plot must be: A manic-depressive scuba-diving ninja floats on his back in a pool of red custard, contemplatedly scratching his cheek with his 9mm. Nothing happens, though, because he is Nowhere Man, a superhero so ineffectual that even non-sequitir situations fail to create drama.
Click "Read more" to see another couple.
Details: "Lord Tedric: Black Knight of the Iron Sphere" by Gordon Eklund, 1955
What is there to work with: Captain Beardy Leatherpants slapping a sword-wielding child, while a pink bikini-wearing Viking crossdresser approaches with a stick, hoping to offset Captain Beardy Leatherpants already questionable balance.
Therefore the plot must be: Looks like a family drama. Mother is a crossdresser. Son, genetically inheriting father's bad balance, tries to protect a stain he's made on the carpet, all the while hoping his dumbass transvestite mother doesn't just walk into dad's sword, as (s)he's clearly paying no attention to her inner GPS.
Details: "Warrior's Blood", by Richard S. McEnroe, 1955
What there is to work with: Luke Skywalker, now inexplicably portrayed by Scott Bakula, leans italic-style into the background to dodge a flying sun pellet. Mistress McFaintyFaint, dressed in yellow and wearing a convenient dream catcher to hold the ensemble together does her best to keep her left thigh from collapsing.
Conclusion: It's the story of an interstellar chiropractor, travelling from planet to planet curing ailments and encouraging people to engage in fitness routines. He also sells fetching white leotards and pale yellow dresses, neither of which are designed to fit particularly well. When not performing chiropracty, Doctor Skywalker flies around space in his shoe-shaped-ship, leaving behind gigantic exhaust plumes of orange debris, which dissipate into neon space signs that advertise his business. Back pain? FOLLOW THAT NEBULA.
There will be more. (Unfortunately.)
I recently posted an article about smartphone apps like Hipstamatic and Instragram, and how they're ruining the originality of photography. I'm about to be spectacularly hypocritical and backtrack over a great deal of what I said. There's a caveat, though. All of the pictures I'm about to post are original, and deliberately edited. I have a huge collection of photographs. I take photos of crap constantly. I have a lot of photos that I like, but I just don't like enough to do anything with. Photos of things, photos of places, photos of the sky. Lots of photos of, just, stuff, really. On their own, none of them stand up to scrutiny. I've posted a few on DeviantART, and some of them have been successfully received. Balanced Barbs, Probably Unsafe and No Sense of Time are a few examples of images that aren't widely hated. Generally, if I post these pictures, they sink to the bottom of the pile, and I eventually delete them because they just end up as clutter.
I'm going to shamelessly self-indulge, now, and post a shit-ton of them all at once. They kind of function as a collection. Put them all together and they get a weird nostalgic feel to them, with their cross-processed filters and Hipstamatic flavour.
So, without further ado, here's a LOT of little pictures. Click "Read more" to, uh, read more. Although I suppose it's more looking at pictures than reading. Click on the images to embiggen. Enjoy!
Every morning, for the past few months, I've needed to use a calculator. The calculator in question is a vintage early-1980s model Sanyo CX 2630 solar powered beast. You can read about its awesome functions at these two extremely nerdy websites: calculator.org and mycalcdb. It has all the functions you'd expect of a calculator, not the least of which is that being solar powered, it hasn't required new batteries since the Red Hot Chili Peppers released Under the Bridge. As an aside, it delights me to no end that there are websites dedicated to the minutiae of vintage calculators. The internet is a haven for anoraks. This particular calculator has issues, though. It adds just fine. Subtracts perfectly. It even handles multiplication and division with aplomb. While I haven't needed to use the function, I have the utmost confidence in its ability to calculate a square root and store the results in its memory. The thing that worries me about this calculator is
THE FREAKING THING IS HAUNTED.
Tucked away in a dark drawer, devoid of fluorescent "solar" power, its twenty year old batteries fail, and it loses its mind. Grasping at the last vestiges of its consciousness, it types a garbled message, leaving it on the screen for me to wonder about the next morning.
I've kept a log. Every time it's left me a message, I've recorded it. The original purpose of this project was simply to see if it was ever the same. Was the message similar, day in and day out? Was it just random crap? (Hint: probably!) Was there a hidden logic?
I'll let you decide. Big gallery to follow, with commentary. Hit the jump.
I've been screwing around with various "vintage effect" iPhone apps, including Hipstamatic, Instagram and a few others of significantly lesser quality. I've started to form the germs of opinions about these apps, and I'm going to attempt to put those opinions into coherent sentences. First, lets explore the apps.
Hipstamatic is an "emulator" of the Hipstamatic 100 camera, a possibly fictional camera that sold very few units in the 1980s. Functionally, it's the equivalent of an Instamatic hand-held camera.
The software includes a bunch of effects in the guise of "films", "lenses" and "flashes". Additional effects can be purchased for a nominal fee.
Films give a range of grain, border and colour effects. Lenses give depth of field (faked, of course), focus anomalies and light leaks. Flashes overlay a coloured gel to the image, while also invoking the iPhone 4+'s built-in LED flash.
These three classes of effect can be used as intended, or mixed and matched by means of your own preferences, or random chance. Shaking the unit mixes all three effects randomly, leading to the need to take each photo several times, shaking between, to ensure you don't snag one of the myriad less desirable combinations of effects.
And oh, yes indeed, they can be undesirable. Horrific combinations can be achieved by combining lens and film effects centuries apart in design. The 1990s film that borders your image with coloured sellotape is particularly horrifying, coupled with an antique Tinto lens it's truly ghastly. Tri-coloured flashes are atrocious. The Salvador Dali film and lens combination is designed solely to pop up occasionally and make you swear loudly as it ruins otherwise good photographs with its peculiar overlaid effects.
Instagram is a different animal entirely, geared primarily toward image sharing. The sharing engine -- recently bought by Facebook for one gazillion dollars and the subject of much privacy concern after a misread alteration to its terms of service gave the allusion the company would sell your soul with your photographs to the nearest punter -- is not the part I'm concerned with today. The effects and filters, though, are.
Like Hipstamatic, Instagram offers the ability to whack on a bunch of effects. The image border and overall colour alterations are handled within a single "film" option, with about twenty different choices at time of writing, with the option to kill the border, auto-enhance the image and apply circular or "tilt shift" depth-of-field effects.
As a result of the way they're constructed, both of these apps have a different effect on your photography. Hipstamatic places the quality of your end result largely in the hands of the Gods, while Instagram gives you the ability to rub various kinds of funk on an otherwise ordinary image to make it look good enough to pollute your friends' Instagram feeds.
The issue I have with these apps is that they tend to remove the onus of responsibility from the photographer, instead allowing the person pressing the button to either blame the filters and effects for ruining an otherwise decent photo, or entirely taking self-credit for a stultifyingly boring image enhanced pointlessly with vintage funk sebum.
I once owned an Olympus point-and-shoot camera, a mJu-300. It was awesome. I actually used it to take some of my earliest lightning photographs, many of which were perfectly cromulent photographs. The camera's functions were so minimal that the only way I could take photographs of lightning was to set the camera to "party" mode, so it was expecting dark environments, turn off the flash, and hope that the ambient light was dull enough to allow it to expose for a full four seconds. I had no ability to control the aperture (f-stop) or ISO. (Although in hindsight, the little bugger of a camera had a minimum ISO of 80, which would be splendiferous on a DSLR.)
Many of the photographs I took with it, however, were not so great. This little camera gave me a super power, though: I could blame the camera. I had no controls to mess with. I had no options that could improve the image. While I could always criticise my skills in Photoshop, there was no way I could have produced more information in any of the photos I took, because there was literally nothing I could do to make them "better".
Hipstamatic and Instagram are much of the same. They're a point of blame, and a source of false credit. They're cool, don't get me wrong. Many of the images look awesome. I'm really fond of the recently released Tintype set, with daguerrotype and colourised tintype films, which look amazing. I'll also continue to use them, simply for the virtue that they tend to make otherwise boring photos interesting.
I'm going to make a concerted effort never to feel pleased with the result of a Hipstamatic or Instagram photograph, though. It just doesn't seem right.
More muzak. The title, if you're curious (and I'm sure you are), is Latin for "ghostly". This one's not as finished as I'd like it to be, but I've pored over it and I can't really be willed to do anything further with it. It's got some nice melody and some bizarreness about it. For some inexplicable reason, it also mocks the hearty power chords of every television theme song from the early 1980s' at one point. If you can spot it, you can have a gold star.
Part of the continuing deluge of "Potentia II: Extras", sequel to "Potentia II', itself a sequel to "Potentia". Bet you didn't see that coming.
Thanks for listening!
In November, I created an image called "Heroes of Science Action Figures", in which I digitally altered some Star Trek action figures to resemble famous scientists. It went a little bit viral, and has (to date, Jan 2013) some 230,000 views on DeviantART.
I've since created a "sequel" to this image, featuring all of the original scientists (with Neil deGrasse Tyson now sporting his famous Celestial Vest), plus an additional 26 new heroes. I managed to fulfil a few requests, included a few more female scientists to offset the alarmingly testosterone-laden original image, and squeeze in another couple of my own personal heroes of science.
I also created a FAQ page for the project, answering in tedious detail a bunch of questions and criticisms the graphic has received.
As an added bonus, here's the 27th new figure. I created the image of a Yuri Gagarin action figure before I made the decision not to include anyone who was involved in the space race/space age/space program. The reasoning behind this was entirely practical: it opened a gigantic can of worms, and I would have no choice but to include another fifty figures to do the space era justice! Maybe one day I'll make another graphic specifically for that task. :D
Thank you everyone who's supported this crazy infographic.
Science rocks.
There seems to be quite a strong mentality these days that one shouldn't answer phone calls that come from blocked numbers -- that is, phone numbers with their caller ID suppressed. I find this interesting. I did a bit of Googling, and I've discovered heaps upon heaps of people who refuse to answer them, often on entirely vague or misguided grounds. I have a number of plausible theories for why people do this, some of which can be combined together: 1. They're expecting bad news. Or they owe money. While it's probably better to answer a telephone call from a debt collector than have them come knocking on your front door, I can at least understand the logic behind avoiding the call.
2. In the '90s, prior to the ACMA Do Not Call Register being introduced to Australia, there was a strong predilection for telemarketers to use blocked numbers when calling. A lot of these companies would also employ computer systems that would automatically dial from lists of numbers, confirming a number's validity when someone answered. These culled lists of numbers-that-get-answered would then be sold on to other telemarketing companies for a sizeable profit. Since the introduction of the DNC Register, it's illegal for telemarketers to call, period, let alone use blocked numbers. That's not to say that a scad few don't choose to break the law and call anyway, but the odds have reduced significantly. Charities and other organisations that are immune to the DNC Register are required to have their numbers visible to the receiver, so that removes them from the equation.
3. Psycho exes, drunk friends, whatnot. You can opt for your own telephone number to be made silent/blocked/private. Some handsets differentiate between blocked numbers and private numbers. Dialing 1-8-3-1 before the recipient's number will temporarily make your Australian phone number into a blocked number, so it's entirely possible to prank call people in this fashion without having a prior arrangement with your telco. In the scenario of these types of calls, I can once again understand the decision to not answer.
There are another couple of things I'd like to add to this inconclusive report:
• Many businesses, particularly doctors and large agencies (to give only two examples) use blocked numbers for a perfectly practical reason. Doctors want to be able to contact their patients to deliver news or test results, but they don't need the patient to be able to call them back on their own personal desk phone with every little itch and malady. That's why there's a receptionist and a system to make appointments. Agencies with call centres use blocked numbers because their staff are often trained in specific tasks (such as performing a data fix on client accounts, for example) and only need to contact the public for specific information. There is no reason that the recipient of the call should ever need to contact the staff member again, because the staff member is not trained to help with general enquiries. It would be a waste of the company's resources to make public the staff's individual extension numbers, because the phones would then be ringing with calls that could not be acted upon by those answering them.
• "If you need to contact me, I have the right to know who you are". Fair enough, but why don't you ask them when you answer the phone? If I was calling from a number that you wouldn't recognise, what would make you answer that number in contrast to no information at all? You can always hang up.
My work calls me from blocked numbers. That's a pretty good reason to answer them. But maybe that makes me unique.
Ring ring.
Follow-up, August 2013: Answers to common search queries relating to this article:
Question: why shouldn't i answer calls from blocked number Answer: There is absolutely no reason why you should avoid answering calls from a blocked number. (Provided you're not avoiding a stalker or dangerous ex or calls from a utility company that wants your money in exchange for a service they've already provided you. In the latter case, perhaps you should just pay your bill. Or arrange a payment plan. Something like that.)
