Winter is really upon us. I can tell without checking the weather reports that it’s been cold overnight. Monday night/Tuesday morning was probably the coldest night since I’ve moved to Bentleigh, based on the evidence:

• The heater switched on in the middle of the night to warm up the house. It’s got a pretty low threshold of 12 degrees overnight (inside), so it only happens occasionally.
• The car had more ice on it in the morning than I’ve seen in years. I needed it that morning, and even though it was after 8am, it took two splashes of water to get enough of it off the windscreen to drive.
• Frost on the grass — not as commonly seen in Bentleigh as at the old place in Carnegie

The BOM figures back this up — the Moorabbin Airport weather station, probably closest to me, got down to 0.6 degrees at 3am, was still only 2.6 at 8:30am, and only reached a high of 13.1 at 1:30pm. Brrr.

It left me regretting not taking my big overcoat with me to work that day — it may have a daggy 80s collar, but at least it keeps me warm.

Those in the really cold parts of the world are probably chuckling at this.

But spare a thought for the Arney family of Pakenham, whose house is without a heater thanks to a screwup by the Department of Housing.

Given Starbucks’ news that it’s closing most of its Australian branches, it was amusing to read Joel Spolsky’s piece on Starbucks and their sales techniques.

I’ve got my own opinions of Starbucks’ product, but I’m not a coffee drinker anyway. Ultimately I think the analysts are right: Starbucks misread the market. Most Australians simply aren’t interested in the bewildering variety of flavours offered to North American customers.

Also an interesting read, in the business pages last Saturday: Aldi’s simple recipe for success. Seems Aldi are doing a bit better with their Australian expansion. But I just love the bit about the two Albrecht brothers deciding to do their own thing, and how they determined where each would trade. They used the standard sibling method:

They got a map of Germany. One of the brothers drew a line and the other had to choose which part of the country he would take.

Spot the disclaimer at the top of the page?

It’s because a growing number of journos seem to be finding my blog. Certainly nothing wrong with that; nice to see they’re on the cutting edge, gathering information from far and wide. Welcome, media people from everywhere!

But I’ve had to emphasise to them that my semi-coherent rambling (particularly about local buses) here isn’t necessarily PTUA policy. Actually it probably matches in intent most of the time, but here I’m likely to be a bit more ranty. So I thought I’d better pop the disclaimer in. I don’t think media people would just quote bits of my blog as if it was PTUA comment — they all seem more careful than that — but trying to make sure.

iTunes has changed the way I buy music, at least to a certain extent. I’m still buying the odd CD, but if I know I want just one particular song, I’m buying just that. For $1.69, you can’t go wrong, can you?

(Though given in the US the price is US$0.99, and the exchange rate is almost at parity, it’s fair to say we’re being gouged. Economist Joshua Gans has calculated an iTunes index, similar to The Economist’s BigMac index… or the PTUA’s train ticket index!)

On the up side it’s certainly cheaper than buying whole albums, and I’m no longer in the situation where I end up with a whole CD otherwise full of songs I don’t really like. On the down side, it’s reduced the chances of discovering that I really like lots of a particular artist’s other songs. (Example: Ocean Colour Scene, which I found after wanting July, used on a TV show.)

Not that I’m buying heaps of individual tracks. Maybe one every few weeks, when I feel a particular urge to own a track, though that chocolate for tunes scheme saw me get five in a week.

Here are some individual tracks I’ve bought recentlyish.

American Pie, Don McLean — this is almost as old as I am. I grabbed it on Friday, after reading Kathy’s terrific blog post about using it as a jumping board for teaching her daughters about 60s culture, music, politics, and even a bit of spiritualism. It’s that kind of song, and having been brought up on the music and ideas of the period has me appreciating the many references immensely.

Is there an equivalent song covering more recent events? (No, Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire doesn’t quite do it.)

The song also takes me back to a long taxi ride through Sydney, from Frenchs Forest to the airport, where this song on the radio seemed to run the entire length of the trip — though it probably didn’t really.

Grey in LA, Loudon Wainwright III — heard this on the radio months ago. A great satirical song about Los Angeles, with some commentary on current issues that I’m somewhat sympathetic to:

And I suppose
Laurie David sure knows
All those cars we drive heat up our earth

And sea temperatures rise
And those constant blue skies
And brush fires can sure curb your mirth

She’s a Rainbow, Rolling Stones — I’d love to tell you some great and deep and meaningful reason why I nabbed this song, but in truth I think I got hooked on it again after hearing it on the Sony Bravia TV advert.

Take Five (The Russians Are Coming), Val Bennett — a great reggae track, perhaps better known as the theme tune from the TV series The Secret Life of Machines. After finding it for free (legal) download, I watched this series with the kids recently, and we’ve all ended up with this song on our iPods. Apart from on iTunes, it’s also available on one of the Trojan Records box sets — I plan to track some of them down at some stage, as there is some terrific reggae on them.

Room at the Top, Tom Petty — I remembered this one from way back when it was released. Truth be told I’m not really sure what it’s about, but it sounds positive. I just like the music.

I Don’t Like Mondays, Boomtown Rats — another oldie; what sparked finding this was hearing it at the primary school concert last year! They used it during the traditional (and generally very funny) teacher’s performance at the end.

(As an aside, why are all the lyrics web sites so overrun with ads? Talk about taking it to extremes.)

What songs have you sought out to hear again?

In an ideal world, you would hope that when a new estate is settled, they’d provide good quality public transport into it from day one, so that people don’t move in and establish car-oriented travel patterns (eg buy one car per adult, and from thence-forth drive everywhere).

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. The Aurora Estate (north of Epping), supposedly the model of green suburbs, was meant to get a train line, but hasn’t yet. Amusingly VicUrban claimed this was no problem: “Aligned with the 2030 planning principles, Aurora has had a bus service since inception”.

Yeeees. That bus service is the 575. It runs hourly, even in peak hours. It stops at 7:30pm. On Saturdays it stops at lunchtime. On Sundays it doesn’t run at all.

Hint: that is nowhere near good enough to encourage people to not drive.

…

Over in Edgewater, which thanks to dog walks with Marita I’ve seen develop from a flat pile of dirt (as it still mostly appears in Google Maps’ satellite pictures) to an almost fully-occupied estate, apart from the nearby 472, they’ve also just got the 409 bus. Thankfully it’s a tad better than what the good people of Aurora got: it actually runs 7-days-a-week until after 9pm.

But it’s still lacking, both in service quality and launch publicity.

1. It only runs every 40 minutes. Even in peak hour. Not great.

2. They put the new bus stop signs in, but nobody got the council to allocate bus zones for the bus stops, so they’d be guaranteed somewhere to stop.

3. The new 409 and the existing 472 both go from Footscray via the local school then past the Edgewater cricket club. But they take different routes to get there, and they appear to depart from different stops at/near Footscray station. And ideally they’d be timed to alternate along the common part of the route to cut waiting times.

4. Evidently they didn’t tell anybody in Edgewater about the new route. Instead of doing a letter-box drop “Hey! You’ve got a new bus service! Here’s the timetable, and a couple of complimentary tickets so you can try it out!” or a big advert in the local paper, they’ve relied on word-of-mouth. And we all know how well that works.

None of this is very hard to do. Some of it costs real money, that’s true. But it can turn something that’s merely ordinary into something genuinely worthwhile and beneficial.

…

On the bright side, at least the new Edgewater bus hasn’t been met with the outright hostility the residents of Yarraville and Altona have been dishing out. Some of them, having ignored the community consultation phase, were outraged to have buses going down their streets, and have set up blockades! (Someone should tell them that public transport access adds value to their properties… though that’s specifically trams and buses trains… a topic for another post.)

In the Altona case, maybe those protesting should spare a thought for the residents of the local retirement village, now disappointed to find the new bus service has been canned. And maybe they should hope and pray that they are never dependent on public transport.

Despite the cold, there’s a surprising number of people on the Sunday morning 9:58 to Frankston.

Two uniformed sailors heading perhaps to the naval base at Crib Point after a night out (this train connects with the Stony Point train);

a lady who insists on standing all the way to McKinnon, papers in her hand, perhaps revision notes, she reads them intently;

a middle-aged couple, he with an iPod, her with a book, to occupy them;

a man with a cold and a big bottle of orange juice;

a girl in a plaid warm woollen coat and dyed red hair;

and me, among others.

I’ve been wondering about this for a while: if the government won’t fund wind power, is it possible to invest in it privately? I may not be able to buy my own personal windfarm, but could I buy a share in one?

Yes I can. Thanks to a story on AM this morning, I found this: Hepburn Wind, who have issued a prospectus for shares (minimum $1000) in a ~$10 million windfarm project that will power 2000 homes.

Excellent. I’ll seriously consider investing.

I know from last time that a post like this may set the cat among the pigeons, so I was going to spend a bit more time refining this. But I haven’t had time, so what the hell.

Smoking would have to be the worst habit anybody could have, ever, wouldn’t it?

Millions are addicted. Poor souls.

It kills, with over 15,000 Australians per year dying from tobacco smoke.

Those that it doesn’t kill, are unhealthy.

It’s about as antisocial as you can get. Even the considerate smokers find their smoke floating away and being breathed in by other people, passing the health risk onto them. In places like public footpaths, this is probably worse than ever now that smoking has (quite rightly) been banned from most indoors areas. Maybe we need enclosed smoking rooms to be set up, so that others don’t have to breathe in smokers’ pollution.

It pollutes not just the air, but also the ground - it’s unparalleled in the world of litter.

It costs. Taxes (quite rightly) raise about $5 billion per year from smokers, and account for over 60% of the retail price. But those taxes don’t even come close to covering the $31 billion in tobacco-related costs to society.

Even now there are proposals to increase it further. Fine by me. Sting them for as much as you can, I reckon. The more people you can put off it, the better.

Really, is there any habit that could be worse?

(On the bright side, apparently the ban on smoking in bars is having a positive effect.)

PS. The commenters have successfully argued that it’s not quite the worst habit. Not even perhaps the worst legal habit, though it’s still up there in the top of the ladder.