Merc
If you’re driving around and you see a white Mercedes C180, licence plate NCC 395, keep your distance. This woman drives at 20 below the speed limit, and obviously having indicators fitted to the car is a waste in her case. Maybe she thinks being a member of Star Fleet means she doesn’t have to use them?
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Power again
Power. Last week in frustration I called in an electrician who hopefully knew what he was doing, unlike my landlady’s electrician, who definitely doesn’t. I mean, how hard is it to check the voltage at the power point? Very hard according to him, requires expensive equipment. Uh huh. Like a $25 multimeter.
So anyway, on Wednesday the guy turns up. Reminded me a bit of one those blokes in The Trade. He seemed to know what he was doing, and looked at a few things. He even said the new switchbox put in by Mr Dodgey Electricals seemed to be a good job, which surprised me a little. And he brought his multimeter. Surprisingly he found the voltage to be up higher than expected, around 249 to 254 volts. That’s just barely within the standard apparently, and enough to make the power company claim they’re innocent of any wrongdoing.
Where does this leave me then? I’ve got a computer monitor that works perfectly at Josh’s, but not at my place. The other stuff (stereo receiver and DVD player) has been shown to be damaged by the earlier shenanigans with the burnt out switch box. But the monitor is a mystery. Maybe it has been damaged just enough that its ability to handle voltage variations (like 254 volts) has been diminished, to the point where it works at Josh’s but not at my place?
I don’t know. But I think I’ve run out of ideas.
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Instant movie review
The Business Of Strangers. Nicely paced – certainly didn’t seem like 84 minutes. A few twists. Thought provoking.
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Dream
(This was written on 22/5/2002, but added to the site on 4/6/2002)
I had this weird dream overnight, the first in quite a while:
I was walking along a road with no cars. I thought it was the Pacific Highway, but for some reason it was in Victoria, near the Bolte Bridge. As time went on, it started to get dark. By the sides of the road there were thick trees, and the occasional gravestone (I had a feeling they were for war veterans). They started to infringe on the left most lane, to the point where it was unusable, and I was thinking "bloody VicRoads, why don’t they maintain this road properly?".
Then as I kept walking, they went back and the road was clear for a while, until it just fell away to a massive pit, maybe 100 metres wide/long. I looked at my mobile phone. The location said something like Calboolture – I don’t remember the exact name of the place, but somehow I knew it was in Queensland. Hmm, I’ve checked, it is indeed in Queensland.
Then the scene changed. I was on a city street. A sign above said "Bankstown", which I knew to be in Sydney. I sensed (but didn’t check) that I had no money, just my mobile phone. So I started writing a text message to Danielle, my friend in Sydney, to come and pick me up. Except I kept getting interrupted by a woman on the street trying to tell me something, it might have been about a shop around the corner.
Then I woke up!
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More crap
In March I talked about crap. A lot of the stuff in my flat is gradually getting worn down, and needs replacing. But should I be spending dosh replacing stuff if I was about to try and buy a house? I was holding off somewhat, and living somewhat reluctantly with my crap.
The situation there has changed a little. A very rundown house I looked at about a month ago sold for a whopping $455K. That’s just stupid. It wasn’t just very rundown, it was also located on prime land, sandwiched between a busy road and a railway line. Seriously, standing in the back yard looking at the house, it was like that scene in the Blues Brothers in Elwood’s flat, with all the trains rumbling by, and causing minor temors as they did so. The kids would have loved it, at least for the first half an hour. Or until they wanted to do anything requiring a minimum of noise. Such as sleep.
So I’m rethinking my strategy. If house prices in the area I want to live in are that stupid right now (and I don’t suppose all of them are, but some certainly are), it’s not going to happen any time soon. I’m going to keep saving my money, and look in a year or two.
Meanwhile, I’m getting sick of my crap. So the Daniel Living Environment Infrastructure Investment Scheme has commenced. New curtains for the livingroom and my bedroom. A grand spanking new bed arrived over the weekend (at the less-than-desirable time of 8:50 on Saturday morning). And I’ve stocked up on new bedlinen because… well, most of the old stuff is too small. I’ll tell you, it’s something of a pleasure to be able to finally stretch out and not have your feet come out of the end of the bed.
The table is of course still wobbly, and if I have my way, is not long for this world.
The power issue continues to haunt me. Of the three appliances misbehaving, only the monitor has been verified to be fault free (by running them at Josh’s place). And tragically, this is the one of the three which is under warranty! I’ll probably get the amplifier serviced and the DVD player replaced, but only once the power has been fixed.
And that depends on the landlady (who I just hassled again on the phone) getting an electrician in who… well, knows what he (or she) is doing. Which it turns out she doesn’t want to do. For some unfathomable reason, she trusts him when he says it must be my equipment at fault. Even though the monitor works at Josh’s place. Uh huh. So, I’m going to chase up my own electrician. Preferably one who, when requested to monitor the power at the power points doesn’t reply that he can’t do it because he doesn’t have the equipment. I get the feeling he works in his spare time as a rodent at Disneyland.
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The adventures of CommuterMan
Last Thursday night, getting home was something of a trial. I left work about 17:30, got to the station and jumped on the first train to Caulfield. Caulfield is the closest major station to me, and sometimes if I catch an express to Caulfield (which is not stopping at my station), it’ll overtake a stopping train (that is stopping at my station) and I’ll save a little time.
This time round, I didn’t see us overtaking any other trains. I got to Caulfield around 17:47 and a half, and found that they were announcing that the 17:49 stopping train had been cancelled. The next would be 18:05, and judging from the swarms of people starting to line up on the platform, would be packed.
This is where a little local knowledge can be a helpful thing. Most people would never think of checking, but I know there’s a bus which runs from Caulfield to a spot quite close to my home. And for just such an eventuality, I had written down the times in my diary. It was due at 17:50. So, getting my umbrella out, I ventured across the grandly named Sir John Monash Drive to the relevant bus stop.
A different bus rolled up, and a few people got on, allowing me to sit down at the stop and read the free tabloid commuter newspaper that I’d grabbed earlier but hadn’t had a chance to read on the train. Even tabloids are hard to read when standing on the train, if it’s crowded enough. If you can get a bit of space and one of those loopy handle things to yourself, you may be able to manage it if you’re lucky, but I hadn’t tried.
I hadn’t missed much. The usual mix of inconsequential showbiz news (which I didn’t care about) and short snippets of real news (which I already knew about). Meanwhile it was getting quite dark, and it was obvious from looking at all the traffic that the rain had made the roads a real mess that night. Even the taxi drivers were driving at sane speeds.
Time marched on, and by the time it got to 18:00, I was thinking maybe the bus was going to be so late that it would be easier to get the 18:05 train. I walked back to a spot opposite the station where I could see the electronic signs revealing many minutes away the train was. That bit of the sign was ominously blank. Just as I was pondering what to do, I saw the bus finally rolling down the street, and leapt back to the bus stop, ready for it.
Just to confuse people, the bus was displaying the destination "Kew", which was the opposite way it was going. Hopefully. I checked with the driver just to be sure. All was well, and we puttered down the street, at a snails pace (not quite literally) due to all the traffic.
The bus driver’s radio (the two-way type, not the easy listening type) revealed the same was happening all over Melbourne. The lethal combination of peak hour traffic and rain had resulted in chaos on the roads. There was a sense of resigned anguish in the other bus drivers’ voices as they spoke about the perils of the Citylink tunnel, how the freeway was crawling and so were all the other routes.
Thankfully for me, once out of the station precinct, the traffic improved a lot, and soon I was at my stop. Only a dance through the puddles in the street (I don’t think the local vicar appreciated the irony in my voice when I said "Lovely evening!" to him), and I was finally at home, around 18:20. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is not too bad really.
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Phones
Why is it that the more irritating the ring on the mobile phone, the more likely that person is to:
- leave it on their desk when they go out
- have it configured so it rings lots of times before it times out
- have people ringing a lot
- have people ringing a lot who don’t get the hint when it rings out that the owner of the phone is not with the phone
- doesn’t check for Missed Calls on returning, so the people who ring get used to having to keep trying, because they never get rung back
If I hear "Que Sera Sera" one more time…
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