1. It was what I needed. I’ve been surviving on a (slightly rickety) old mono laser printer for some time now. I decided to upgrade to a colour copier/scanner/printer, to get back colour printing, to clear out the aging scanner that is only just compatible with Windows XP, and to avoid having to go to the library for the occasional photocopy. I didn’t want fax. Linux support for possible future PCs would be good, too.

2. A brand I like. Canon. I’ve got a 5-year-old Canon camera, and a scanner that’s close to ten years old. Neither have ever skipped a beat. (Apart from a strange camera message that turned out to be particles of grit stuck in the lens gears.) The newish video camera is doing well too.

3. A good model on special at Officeworks for $249. I didn’t want a cheapie, so was looking at the MP610. Nice and quick. Fancy colour screen. Direct link to my camera. Prints on CDs too. Duplex! Drivers for XP, Vista, Mac, Linux. Could pick it up at the local Officeworks so I didn’t have to lug it home by hand.

4. $50 cash-back offer! Woo hoo! A good deal just got better.

5. Easy to set up. The graphical instructions, initially intimidating, turned out to be perfectly logical. Even did its own print head alignment thingy. All running, no problems. (Well, except that it didn’t come with a USB cable, but I had a spare, and a quick trip to Dick Smith the next day procured another for $5.)

6. Cash-back form not overly complex. First job of the printer was to print it out, and photocopy the receipt. No arcane registration codes necessary. (Which once with a Quicken product prevented me putting in the correct application and forgoing my money. Annoying.) Cash-back form into the mail, in time to reach them by the 31/1/2008 deadline (well, unless AusPost do the thing they did with Jeremy’s letter).

It was all looking like the perfect purchase. Happy with the product, good price, and a bonus $50 coming my way.

Then I noticed the small print on the cash-back terms and conditions. It was meant to be purchased by 31/12/2007. Damn! Yet that’s not mentioned anywhere else, and both Officeworks and Dick Smith are still mentioning the rebate in their latest advertising. Hmmm.

Well maybe Canon’s processing people don’t know about the small print either? Yeah, fat chance.

Oh well, I’m still happy with my new printer anyway.

Update: One of my ever-helpful commenters notes the cashback offer got extended. W00t!

(With apologies to Bargearse.)

I pay $73 per year to the RACV because I want someone to get me out of a scrape when I’ve locked myself out of my car or the battery is dead or whatever. It somewhat disturbs me that what’s left over from that $73 goes into lobbying for more, bigger, faster roads.

I saw this in action on Tuesday at a discussion at Treasury Place. The same day the RACV were seen on the TV news calling for the expansion of roads at the end of the Eastern Freeway, and “missing link” ring road sector through Melbourne’s northeast “green wedge” — or else Melbourne would grind to a standstill.

I don’t believe that for an instant. Melbourne would survive, and could thrive if no more freeways were built, and the money was put into public transport instead. In fact, just the $1 billion currently being spent to add two extra lanes to the Monash Freeway would pay for at least two major rail lines to be built.

And while the RACV continues to claim that more road building helps traffic, what it really does, apart from burning billions of dollars in transport funding, is provide more road space that gets more people driving, undermining cycling, walking and public transport, and leading to further traffic congestion and pollution.

I don’t want my money going to lobbying. But it turns out there are alternatives for getting roadside assistance, which don’t involve the RACV.

I found one (outdated) list of options, but of these, some are affiliated with RACV: Assist Australia, Caltex. ANZ at one stage had Auto Assist, but it’s not clear if that’s still on offer, nor who they outsource(d) to.

Some don’t make it clear if they outsource: International SOS, Mondial Roadside Assistance (won’t touch vehicles over 10 years old, which rules me and my 15-year-old Magna out).

Hard to know how good they are when you’re in a spot, but it looks like 24/7 Road Services might be one to try. Base-level coverage for $55, so it’s actually cheaper than RACV. I’ll make sure they’re not involved in lobbying, and I’ll going to sign up with them when my RACV membership expires.

And if you’re another one of the RACV’s 1.9 million members, and are only in it for the road service, and don’t want your money to pay for lobbying for paving the planet, I’d encourage you too to move your business elsewhere.

Given there are magazines for just about every topic under the sun, I suppose you can tell a lot about a person’s interests from which ones they buy. A lot of those that I buy (or subscribe to) are pretty geeky.

But I don’t normally buy railway-related magazines. Many of them I find overly-gunzelly, which is not my thing. But I will admit to last week buying the November 2007 edition of Modern Railways, the British-based magazine which was featuring the new High Speed 1 link from the English Channel to London, which means now you can travel from London to Paris by train in just over two hours.

Looking at some of the pictures, one can understand why engineers enjoy what they do. It’s as close to sexy as inanimate objects get… sweeping curves, sleek rails and wires, impressively huge bridges and viaducts, and the graceful arched roof of the renovated St Pancras station.

And then there’s the trains. They rocket along at 300 kmh. Makes our 160 kmh V/Locity trains look slow. Even the very zippy UK east coast train to Scotland I rode in 1998 crawls along in comparison at a mere 200 kmh.

This kind of high-speed rail service would be nice to see in Australia, but probably isn’t cost-effective — it would cost billions and billions to build, and Melbourne to Sydney is perhaps just a bit too far for it to be competitive with air… though the TGV record is 574.8 km/h, so theoretically the trip could be just a few hours.

There are many other higher priorities, particularly in urban rail.

But it’s nice to see others are able to build these kinds of super-fast super-efficient (and carbon neutral) railways. Next time if/when I get to Europe, I’ll certainly be taking a spin on it.

Now, if only we could get all the engineers currently employed on building roads to build new rail lines instead. They’re doing it in Perth, but alas, not here.

Jeremy is rather unimpressed with the postal service. On Monday last week he mailed a letter to himself from my mum’s place, and it took until today to arrive. Some other mail had been turning up — sporadically, but something every few days. I wonder if some of the posties on post-Christmas holidays?

For a while there we thought it had vanished completely, and would eventually be like that recent case where a postcard turned up 93 years after it had been sent.

But as it is, it took nine days to cover such a short distance: 2.3km as the crow flies; 3.3km walking; a little further by road. So although it probably went via any number of mailing centres, it had an average speed of 0.015 km/h.

Josh sent me a nifty device for measuring the power consumption of various devices. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time: to see what drains power, and how much, and to see in particular what even drains power when it’s idle.

So I spent a couple of hours plugging it into various things and measuring how many watts they were pulling while running, and while not.

Although you often hear about appliances using energy while on standby, I found that for most, this was not the case. In most cases, they pulled zero watts while not running. But there were some exceptions, which I’ll note.

Pedestal fan: On setting one 33 W, setting two 38 W, setting three 45 W.

Kettle: 2289 W — whoa! So it’s important not to put more water in the kettle than you actually need, not just for the sake of speed, but also energy used.

Microwave oven: when running on high 1416 W.

Christmas tree lights: 28 W. It’s only a small tree, not one of those Christmas light extravaganzas you see some places. I don’t generally leave them turned on all the time anyway actually.

TV: Standby 19 W. On (including while muted) 80-120 W. It’s a 68cm CRT screen, and I’ve got it setup so that if left on standby for more than 30 minutes, turns itself completely off, which is good, as it’s apparent that leaving it on standby permanently would be a big waste of energy.

CD Player: 9 W, whether it was playing anything or not.

Amplifier: 16-17 W while on, whether it was silent, or playing radio or from a CD. Nothing measurable while on standby, despite the presence of a standby light.

XBox: Turned off 7 W. On but with no game running 55 W. Playing a game 55-64 W. Pah, 7 W when it’s switched off and doing nothing… bloody Microsoft, typically wasting resources.

MediaGate: On but stopped 11 W, playing 14 W.

DVD player: 9 W while on, whether it was playing or not.

Clothes dryer: Warm 1815 W, Hot 1900 W, During the cooling part of the cycle 75 W. I always knew these things used a lot of power, and this proves it… thankfully I don’t use it very much; the clothes lines (the main one, and another under-cover one for “high priority” items) works for most things.

Vaccuum cleaner: Min power 170 W, max power 1400 W.

Computer CPU: off 12 W, running Windows 75-90 W. Ridiculous… 12 W just to keep the clock going.

Computer screen: off 7 W, on 32 W.

Some things seemed to pull so little power as to be undetectable: the bedroom clock/radio, mobile phone charger, iPod dock and computer speakers all reported 0 W whether they were off, or on and blasting away/charging. I think the only electrical thing I can think of that I missed measuring is the washing machine.

There are some lessons here. Things like kettles and dryers should be used sparingly: don’t put more water in the kettle than is needed, and don’t use the dryer unless necessary. Most other appliances pale into insignificance compared to these.

And my plan is to re-arrange the powerboards to isolate those appliances that draw power while “off”… the computers and XBox (which after all is just a computer in a game machine’s body) in particular, so they can easily be switched off at the wall without affecting anything else.

At some stage last year I reached the point where I’d been separated/divorced for as long as I was married.

I’m happy to say it’s a path that most of my contemporaries don’t seem to have followed me down. Indeed, of those who have got married and had kids, I can only think of one who has separated.

One of the things that’s made it work is an attitude of co-operation; to make things work well for the kids. It was partially inspired by a newspaper article that came out at precisely the right time.

In that spirit, I’ve kept up occasional contact with my ex-in-laws. They’re good people.

So I was saddened to hear that my ex-father-in-law died suddenly last week. I liked him. I thought him a good, generous man, who showed great hospitality when we visited Arizona in 1996. He’ll be missed.

I’m alone in the house, blasting Billy Bragg on the stereo while cleaning up. Part of preparation for the concert on January 30th.

Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards… my God I love that song. Does it speak to everybody in community activism like this?

• For those who haven’t seen it (I hadn’t), here’s the original video clip for the song.

Tank Park Salute, though, saddens me. Ah, the power of good music.