I didn’t buy a house on Saturday. Despite assistance, I was outmanoevred. It does strike me that the auction process is not dissimilar to professional poker.

Anyway in preparation for the auction, I needed to be ready to pay a 10% deposit of (argh) tens of thousands of dollars by cheque. So last week I moved a heap of money from my St George DragonDirect account (which is fee-free and has pays pretty good interest) into my Commonwealth Bank account (which I use for every day stuff, and has a chequebook attached).

St George will let you do this in hits of up to $100,000 per day. All good.

Commonwealth, however… They limit you to $5,000 per day by electronic banking. And though their Netbank teases you by implying you can get that limit raised, when I rang up to get it done, they told me you can’t. $5K is it ($10K from business accounts). Their alternative involves going into the branch and either buying a bank cheque (which means then going into a St George bank branch to get the money in… like I have time for that), or doing a slow-but-cheap electronic transfer which will cost about $4 and take a WEEK. Or paying a $28 fee to transfer the money electronically instantly.

Apart from not really having the time, I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of that. I’ll trickle it back to St George, $5K a day. And it’s time to find out if St George can do chequebooks. ‘Cos this is ridiculous. WTF did they build electronic banking for anyway if they force you to go into the branch for stuff like this?

Old media: It’s available when it’s convenient for us. The 7pm news. Sport at 7:20. Weather at 7:25. Morning newspaper at 6:30am.

New media: I want it now. Click. It’s there.

Old media: Huge audiences, available with low, well established, reliable technology: paper, radio, TV.

New media: Minority but growing. Mainstream outlets driven by the old media, but a lot more niche outlets as well. Largely reliant on emerging technologies that some people haven’t caught up with yet: Internet, SMS.

As my use of new media has increased, I realise how impatient I have become at times. The other night watching the weather forecast, I wanted the weatherman to get to what matters most to me: the Melbourne forecast. Why was it taking so long? I realised that it takes about a second (maybe two) on my computer to find the bookmark and click to the equivalent web page.

It makes me ponder the worth my newspaper subscription. I like being able to sprawl on the floor with my breakfast and get a summary of the day’s news. But so much of it was in the breaking news the day before. On weekdays at least, I’m really only reading to see if my favourite topic has been covered, which isn’t so much consuming the news as monitoring it.

If The Age offered a paid subscription to all their paper content online (maybe half of it makes it onto the public web site at the moment) for, say, a quarter of the price of the paper version (all printing and distribution costs gone), I’d be sorely tempted, especially if it were easily updatable, browsable and searchable on a PDA to read on the train.

Mind you I’d still pay for the weekend papers to be delivered. Lazing in bed reading it beats anything you can do online.

I could tell you about how I got halfway to work yesterday and decided I didn’t feel well and I was going home to spend a lazy day resting. But I won’t. Instead I will present you with a hypothesis:

That listening to the iPod makes doing the dishes go faster.

I also spent a little (just a little) time yesterday sorting out my CD collection. No, not some kind of High Fidelity-type sorting out session. I was pondering the CDs I’ve been putting onto my iPod, pondering those that I never listen to, pondering the lack of shelf space in the CD part of the bookshelf, and pondering if I might find some CDs that I can ditch, sell, dump, donate, lose, or otherwise get rid of.

While there are quite a few I haven’t listened to in some time, there were less that I felt comfortable in getting rid of. I did find about a dozen, however, which is a good start. The question then becomes how I get rid of them. I’m not sure I’m willing to suffer the humiliation of a secondhand record shop rejecting them.

If I can’t summon up the courage for that, maybe I’ll look through the selection and send a couple of carefully targetted emails to possible grateful recipients.

On Tuesday night Melbourne City Council approved a plan (by the narrowest of margins) to build four new tram superstops along Collins Street. Fine, very good, wheelchair accessible, more pleasant to wait in and use than safety zones. But they also plan to close three stops: at Queen, King and Russell Streets.

We’ve had a tram stop every block in the CBD for over 100 years. It’s simple to understand, it’s logical, it makes life easy for those who don’t catch trams or go into the city very often. Now unless you know it off by heart, it’ll be guesswork knowing which stop to get off at.

The motivation is to speed up trams. A worthwhile idea, certainly. But you know what… even at those intersections where they’re deleting stops, there’s going to be absolutely no traffic light priority. So there’s a 50% chance (higher at King Street) that the trams will have to stop anyway. The same thing already happens outside St Paul’s Cathedral in Swanston Street.

And all because the MCC traffic engineers objected to tram priority, or even shortening traffic light cycle times because it would slow down cars. Obviously they haven’t got it around their heads that 1.1 (average occupancy) people in a car is not as important as scores of people in a tram, particularly in the city centre, where there’s so little road space and so many people to move around.

Don’t think they’ll stop there. Plans for Flinders Street and Victoria Parade reveal more stops to be deleted. Seems as though they want to chop a third of stops out right across Melbourne.

• PTUA: Road engineers support plan to close tram stops — Tram passengers, business leaders ignored

As I’ve started ripping my CDs onto the iPod, I’ve been viewing and playing more of my CD collection than I have in quite some time. Here are some of my favourite obscure CDs:

Doug Anthony Allstars - Icon — the DAAS at their irreverent and musical best, with a lot of tracks being studio versions of songs from their original appearances on The Big Gig. People keep telling me how rare this is on CD, maybe because when it came out (1990) not that many people had CD players, so as it’s out of print, not many copies are around secondhand. If I dig around among the VHS tapes, I might even find the film clip of I Want To Spill The Blood Of A Hippy.

Eric Clapton (with Michael Kamen) - Edge Of Darkness — the soundtrack for the remarkable, subversive, addictive, eco-terrorism TV series. The one time I played LaserTag, we got them to play this during the game, and boy did it suit it. Eighteen minutes of sometimes frenetic but always atmospheric piano and electric guitar bliss. It’s one of those tiny CDs too, you don’t see too many of them around, though virtually all CD players can handle them.

Simon Fowler and Oscar Harrison - Live on the Riverboat — their band Ocean Colour Scene is obscure enough outside the UK, but this is an acoustic concert of theirs, recorded on a boat, which curiously doesn’t include their Riverboat Song. The disc came in a thoroughly annoying plastic cover with simulated blue water (actually jelly stuff) inside.

Jellyfish - Spilt Milk — another band pretty much unheard of outside their homeland, the US, and probably not overly prominent within it. I’m not sure why they appealed so much when I saw their New Mistake video clip on Rage years and years ago. Maybe it’s validation of video clips as a marketing tool. A curious mix of rock, Queen-like harmonies and orchestration, and… ummm… oh, I don’t know. He’s my best friend sounds so innocent until you realise what it’s about. And I’d love to know who Ghost At Number One is taking a swipe at. Sadly the band vanished after a couple of albums.

And yes, all these are now on my iPod.

(From next week’s Aliens of London)

Another weekend gone. In summary:

Helping with painting, which given it involved a liberal application of Lean Lemon, has left a certain U2 song revolving in my brain.

Absolute shocker in the footy tipping — 3 out of 8. Bah.

Inadvertently left a spot of honey on the kitchen counter. It took about 30 hours, but the ants found it and swarmed around. When I discovered them, I committed anti-cide on them.

Watched the third new Doctor Who episode, “The Unquiet Dead.” Series writer Steve Moffat commented last year that fantasy TV makers are now in the post-Buffy era, and you can see the Buffy influences in this episode. Great stuff, very enjoyable. After all these years, it’s rapidly becoming my favourite TV show again.

Dear Origin energy,

I’m not interested in switching electricity companies. Not that it would really be a switch, since the power coming down the lines to my house wouldn’t change at all. No, all I’d be switching is who sends me power bills. And unless you’re about to tell me that your bills are so incredibly aesthetically pleasing that they’ve won major design awards and this will somehow be of advantage to me, I’m not even tempted.

In fact I’m about to sign up for your rival AGL’s green energy plan. It may not be the ultimate in clean power, but given the government’s reluctance to replace the filthly brown coal power stations with something a little cleaner, I figure they need all the encouragement they can get. Roll on with the wind farms, I reckon.

So don’t send poorly paid young men around to my house to knock on the door precisely when I’m in the middle of things and not expecting visitors. Real visitors ring first. Oh, but don’t ring me up either. If you must bug me, do it by mail - electronic or paper, I don’t really care, as long as I can ignore your offers with the least effort possible.

Oh, unless you can solve my conundrum over the kitchen fluorescent light, and its mysterious non-universal starter. If you can fix that for me, I’ll sign up for your bills, no problems.