The psychedelic playground
The City of Glen Eira has some pretty psychedelic playground equipment in some of its parks. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what you’re meant to do with it.
This one I don’t think many people would have problems with. You get on and it spins around, alarmingly fast. Pretty easy.
This thing however, reminds me of two miniature monorails, but appears to involve “surfing” the board things while holding onto the railings. You can also try and sit on them and ride them, but that doesn’t appear to be how it was designed. Though I’m not really sure what they had in mind.
This one is obviously inspired by a Mobius strip, and is quite a challenge (in a good way) to climb. We noticed it’s made from four identical pieces hooked together.
And as for this, Escher couldn’t have done better with the ladder. The middle bit is like a rock climbing wall, but impossible to actually use. The slide thing is hinged and wobbles from side to side. Weird.
(Elsewhere they have equipment that is easier to figure out, and more suitable for little kids.)
Local goss via Twitter
Twitter allows one to search, and provides RSS for search results, so you can feed it into RSS readers like Google Reader to keep track of Twitter references to your preferred keyword.
So I thought I’d set up one for Bentleigh, which tells me what’s going on in my neighbourhood.
Happily I don’t live in Springfield or somewhere with a name that’s very common, and most of the Tweets I see are about Bentleigh.
With one major exception: There’s a lady out there in cyberspace (in Charlotte, North Carolina, to be precise) who owns a dog called Bentleigh, and she loves Tweeting about him.
So amongst the updates discussing the pros and cons of the neighbourhood, or highlighting the presence of jobs, property, traffic snarls due to tow trucks, speed cameras, and really important FourSquare posts, there’ll be something like:
“I love bentleigh! His furry ass keeps me entertained!”
and
“Throwin on my uggs! Puttin bentleigh in his jacket! Quick walk before the snow sticks! :/ brrrrrr”
Yup.
Fortunately I’ve found that as with a Google Search, you can include a minus sign and a word you want to exclude from your results, so I’ve been able to filter out most of the dog references.
No offence to the dog, of course.
Giving a hand-up
Was having a chat to somebody the other week when Liz, a fellow Bentleigh resident and fellow troublemaker, wandered past and said hello. Liz has got active in the debate over social housing, following the furore over a proposed development in the very SE-corner of Bentleigh to accomodate disadvantaged women. (In my book given it’s across the street from Moorabbin Town Hall and Moorabbin Station, it’s really Moorabbin, not Bentleigh, but I digress.)
While it’s been approved by planning minister Justin Madden, some local residents remain vocal in their opposition. I heard one ring into 3AW last week, trying to make out that the 4-storey development was a “high-rise”, thus trying to paint it in the same light as the old 1960s-70s housing commission megablocks you see in South Melbourne and Prahran and Fitzroy (all very desirable suburbs these days; at the time they they were built they must have been run-down and cheap).
I’d have a problem with it too if it were a real high-rise. Building huge tower blocks and filling them with disadvantaged people is probably not going to give you good outcomes. But providing them with housing and spreading them through the suburbs in small-to-medium-sized developments (especially in a spot like this that already has buildings that high) I think can work well. This is particularly the case in a spot like central Moorabbin which is adjacent to the station and closeby to shops and other services, so many will have the choice not to blow large portions of their meagre incomes on being car-dependent.
Like other forms of welfare, subsidised public housing gives people a hand-up to help them get their lives together. In my case, my family were not well-off when we were growing up. During my early-teens, we moved a few times due to rising rents, but eventually settled in public housing not too far from the “Bentleigh” development.
Together with Austudy funding (now called Youth Allowance) and the Higher Education Contributions Scheme (effectively a loan of university fees, paid back when I started earning a reasonable amount of money), this hand-up from the government allowed both my sister and I to work part-time as we studied, and to enter the workforce with university qualifications. The result is that our working lives, we’ll be paying lots and lots of tax.
Of course I know this is not always how it works, but I reckon the government (and the country) made a nice tidy profit on us. Helping when it mattered has helped my sister and I reach our potential.
And that’s why it makes sense to give people a helping hand.
ISP shopping
I’m ISP shopping.
I’d been considering it anyway, as I’m still using ye olde ADSL1, and in the past couple of years, ADSL2+ has become available in my neck of the woods.
I’ve been using my current ISP, Netspace, for about 7 years, I think. Over that time they’ve been pretty reliable, but not without fault.
My two major beefs with them have been:
- Every so often they’ll revise their plans, and a new plan which is cheaper and better will start up. But they don’t upgrade their customers; they don’t even mention it. Unless you go looking to see what the latest offer is, you wouldn’t see that you could change and get more bandwidth and a lower monthly fee.
- In an outage, the authoritative place to check the network status is their Newsdesk page. But that’s not accessible from mobile phones; at least not my mobile phone — in part because it’s behind a logon screen which doesn’t seem to work in some phone browsers. So you have to be at a computer, connected to the net to find out why you can’t access the net. (Or of course you could waste time ringing them up to check.)
Reliability on Netspace took a battering this week, when the service went down on Tuesday morning and stayed down all morning, coming back up after lunch. There was another, shorter outage in the evening, and again on Wednesday afternoon. This wouldn’t bug me normally very much, but I was working from home on Tuesday, and had a bunch of stuff to get done.
I ended up getting a “tethered” connection via my mobile phone. Surprisingly easy with the N95, using Nokia PC Suite, though it drained the battery pretty fast. I don’t have any kind of data plan on the phone, so it could get quite expensive if done on a regular basis, but the connection was rock solid, and fast.
So anyway I’m ISP shopping.
The two that were recommended by the most people: iiNet and Internode.
Internode get a good rap from a lot of people, though it looks like they can’t give me ADSL2+, only ADSL1 or “Fast ADSL”. A speed upgrade would end up costing me a fair bit more than I’m paying now.
In contrast, with iiNet I may end up paying just marginally more, but for more bandwidth and a much faster connection:
| ISP | Current: Netspace ADSL1: 1500k/256kbps |
iiNet ADSL2+: Up to 24000kbps |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | 30 Gb (15 peak+15 off-peak) $59.95/month Shaped. Off-peak is midnight-7am |
60 Gb (30 peak+30 off-peak) $49.95 Shaped. Off-peak is 2am-8am |
| Pros | Pretty reliable in the past | Network status publicly available Cool advertising Free content including ABC iView They’re fighting the good fight |
| Cons | Not reliable this week Status page hidden behind logon |
Dunno. Anyone know? |
| Phone | Telstra Homeline Budget | Phone 1 |
| Cost | $21.95/month Unlisted number $2.93/month Caller ID $6/month |
$29.95/month Unlisted number $2.93/month Caller ID $6/month |
| Call cost | Local 30 cents | Local 20 cents |
| Total inc 30 local calls/month |
$91.83 | $94.83 |
I haven’t looked at setup costs (including a new modem), cancellation fees, or costs of non-local calls, since I hardly ever make any on my home phone.
What’s been stopping me? Inertia, until this week. And perhaps fear of losing my connection for a few days.
I know this is like asking everybody what car is best, but has anybody got any comments? Any drawbacks to this plan?
Any other contenders who have fast ADSL/2+ in Bentleigh?
(Whirlpool says other companies with ADSL2+ DSLAMs installed at the Bentleigh exchange are Primus, TPG and Telstra. I notice Highway1 uses iiNet’s DSLAM; once upon a time circa 1996, they kindly hosted Toxic Custard.)
Update: Clarification thanks to Twitter people: Internode’s “Fast ADSL” is in fact up to ADSL2+ speeds, re-selling access from Telstra. So it would be just as fast as iiNet’s ADSL2+, but is more expensive, about double the price.
Update Mon 8/2/2010: I certainly can’t complain that Netspace ignore their customers’ concerns — they’ve been in touch to discuss things. Will post an update when the dust settles.
Adults-only Lego
I found this Lego set on Amazon UK. It’s actually way more elaborate (and expensive) than any I remember seeing in the Australian catalogues, but what I thought was really funny was that Amazon has attached a legal-sounding age restriction to it, as if it was an adult video game or DVD, or alcohol.
“Not for sale to persons under the age of 16. By placing an order for this product, you declare that you are 16 years of age or over. This item must be used responsibly and appropriately.”
That’s right folks — responsibly and appropriately — which means no giving it to your 7 year-old and letting him pull all the pieces apart to make robots.
ABC web site useable again
I noticed the other day that the ABC Local web sites were down for maintenance.
They got a revamp in mid-2008 that left it incredibly messy. Apart from the garish green and black colours, it was impossible to find things.
It’s like they forgot that they’re most often promoted via the ABC Local Radio stations; finding programme information and clips was really difficult, lost in a sea of links.
Happily they’ve given it another facelift, and not only are the colours a bit easier on the eyes, it’s a easier to find things again.
Progress, definitely progress.
Some pics
“Food”? What, it’s not really food? (Frankston)
Could this be a conduit to the future? (Northcote Station)
Road sign that actually goes around a corner (Wonthaggi)
Sydney’s new PT fares
Sydney’s introducing a new public transport fare system called “MyZone”, from April.
At first I pretty much believed the name and the colourful graphics on the web site, which implied that it’s a Melbourne-like multi-modal zone fare system, working on every train, bus, tram and ferry.
But it isn’t. It’s mostly still paying by distance — but with a flatter structure than at present, with only 5 different train fares, 3 bus fares and 2 ferry fares. You will still be able to get TravelTen tickets, but you’ll still pay twice if your trip involves a change of vehicle. (Well, except changing trains I assume.)
Apart from not being integrated across services (just having to change vehicles and wait should be penalty enough, let alone a financial penalty as well), the problem with this system of fare stages is it’s almost impossible to know what you’ll pay in advance.
They do have combined zone tickets, but it’s like some kind of Frankenstein creation. The MyMulti tickets look at first glance similar to Melbourne’s zone tickets which are valid on any vehicle, but they’re not. For a start the only daily version covers the whole of greater Sydney, and costs whopping $20 — designed to replace the pretty-much-tourists-only Day Tripper.
Weekly, Quarterly, Yearly MyMulti tickets look more reasonably priced, and simple, with three zones, but there’s a catch: like the current crop of TravelPass tickets, they’re designed for people travelling to/from Sydney’s CBD and inner suburbs. If you travel say from Katoomba to Blacktown every day, which is entirely within the MyMulti Zone 3, then tough: the only way you can use it is to pay for all three zones.
On the upside, these new tickets apply on Sydney’s private bus services, which until now have had their own unique fare structures. On the down side, none of these new tickets will be valid on the Monorail (hardly a surprise) or the Sydney Light Rail (a silly omission). And using the Airport line stations will still incur extra fees.
So all in all, it simplifies things, but it’ll still be more complicated than it should be. But we shouldn’t expect too much: they’re going to be using the same ticket machines they already have, so it’s hardly surprising they haven’t been able to completely overhaul the fare system.
As one commentator said, “they’ve just moved into the 1980s.”
Given their Smartcard project T-Card failed because of the myriad of different fares, I do wonder if this isn’t the precursor to having another go at it.
Good luck to them. If they do go down that path, here’s hoping it doesn’t turn into another T-Card… or another Myki, for that matter.
- Daily Telegraph: New structure means cheaper fares
- Positive reaction from Action for Public Transport, the local advocacy group
- Sydney Morning Herald: Inner-city commuters hit by hefty fare shake-up
