Old names
Was just watching the footy and noticed that the Sydney Swans have the initials of their old name — SMFC — on their jumpers near the back of the neck. Had previously noticed that the Bulldogs also have this — FFC.
Collingwood doesn’t seem to have it. How many other teams do? Is it a heritage thing? Only the teams that have changed their names? Maybe the footy experts reading will know.
Hmm, I wonder if there are present-day teams from Kerang or Korrumburra that go by the initials KFC.
Tags: AFL, heritage, Sport
4 comments
Attn: Melbourne City Council
On Thursday I noticed a Melbourne City Council City Of Melbourne worker wandering around Collins Street with a street sign under his arm, apparently puzzled as to where to put it up.
Today I noticed it had gone up. In the wrong place.
There is no way through to Howey Place there. If you follow it you’ll walk straight into a Kookai store, with no way out the other side. (Though you might come out with one of those bags of theirs that large numbers of women seem to use as pseudo-handbags.)
I reckon the sign should be about 25 metres to the east, where you can cut through Collins 234 (The Building Formerly Known As The Sportsgirl Centre), which takes you to Howey Place.
Whoops.
I’ve put a feedback note into the Council via their online form. We’ll see how long it takes for them to fix it.
Update Saturday 27/6. Noticed yesterday afternoon the sign had been moved to the correct spot.
Tags: city, Collins Street, signs
1 comment
How to move people efficiently
The most efficient way of moving people is using their own two feet.
Here’s the statistical measure:
(Graph from Teufel, D, 1989, ‘Die Zukunft des Autoverkehrs’ (The future of car traffic), Umwelt und Prognose Institut, Heidelberg — and used more recently in PTUA’s Response to Australia’s Future Tax System Consultation Paper. Here’s another representation of similar information.)
…and here’s a practical example:
Don’t bother with the sound, it’s crap due to some noisy machinery nearby. Sorry, it’s a bit jerky. Gimme a break, it came straight off the phone onto Youtube. Need to figure out how to fix that.
Anyway, you get the idea, right? The pedestrian sequence here shifts an order of magnitude more people than go through in cars each hour.
What do you call these intersections that allow people to move in any direction? It’s not a zebra crossing, nor a puffin, pelican or toucan… ah, found it — apparently it’s known as a pedestrian scramble. Not as catchy without an animal name.
Anyway, I do wonder why there aren’t more of them. As far as I know this is the only one in Melbourne, but other locations would really benefit, with Bourke/Spencer Streets being a prime candidate.
Elsewhere, these might not work, but there’s a lot more than can be done to improve pedestrian amenity and get more people walking.
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12 comments
I am danielbowen. danielbowen I am.
Every so often, some new online service will present itself. Some turn out to be duds, but some turn out to be pretty compelling. As most of them are free, it’s often handy to grab your name early on while it’s available, in case it becomes useful later.
In the prehistoric days of the net, I used a nickname. But I went off that, and switched to the same alias that usually matched my corporate email name: dbowen. So back when Excite was a portal and email service that people actually used (as opposed to a the ghost town it is now), I managed to nab the dbowen user on there, as well as a bunch of other, more obscure services.
At some stage it got too hard, and I switched first to dfbowen, then to danielbowen. Certainly longer, but this is an easier one, and is also more readily identifiable with me.
There are obviously other Daniel Bowens around online, but I seem to have usually managed to beat them to the punch on this stuff. I’m obviously more of a geek than they are. The most recent was Facebook, but here’s a list of the main places I’ve grabbed my name:
- danielbowen.com — blog… and really, the only one of these that I truly own
- danielbowen at gmail.com — now my main personal email — I periodically get emails for one of my namesakes here. The same logon is used for a multitude of other Google services
- danielbowen at yahoo.com — an email address I no longer use, but it’s the same profile used for YahooGroups, and also for…
- flickr.com/photos/danielbowen — my Flickr photo feed
- danielbowen at hotmail.com — I don’t use this for email, but it is my Passport logon, for various (mostly Microsoft) services. Someone’s got this one mixed up too, as I’ve noticed an influx of Match.com dating service emails, apparently directed at a namesake in Western Australia.
- twitter.com/danielbowen — the Twitter feed, providing useless snippets of information, 140 characters at a time
- friendfeed.com/danielbowen — I don’t really use this very much, but it combines the blog, Twitter, Flickr, geekrant.org posts, and my Google News EgoSearch into one handy stalking package
- User:Danielbowen — my Wikipedia user page. I dabble in Wikipedia, undoing obvious vandalism when I see it, and occasionally adding things to articles
- facebook.com/danielbowen — but note, I don’t really use it that much at the moment. Mostly Scrabble, and keeping up with friends that I actually know in real life, and a handful I know well online. Stick to the blog/Twitter/Friendfeed if you want to stalk me.
What’s your handle? Do you have a single one you use online? Have you missed out on your preferred logon on some services, and had to compromise, or have you got something reasonably unique?
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6 comments
Quick things
Why is Westpac bank turning into my mother? Do they really expect to get more customers like this?
Great quote:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
– Robert J. Hanlon
Star Trek: all creeds and colours of humanity, in a spirit of co-operation and harmony, working together at hating the Romulans.
This trailer for the movie Knowing… doesn’t really make me want to see it, but if the train carriages look familiar to Melburnians, that would be because it was filmed here, and they used old Melbourne Hitachi carriages for filming, though apparently the subway scene is set in New York City.
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3 comments
Collins Street, 9am
I was hoping to find a decent JPG copy of that modified John Brack Collins Street 5pm that was in The Age a few weeks ago — the one where everybody’s wearing iPods — but haven’t seen it online, and I’m not sure I can get a good scan from the paper copy I have.
No matter, here instead is Collins Street 9am (this morning).
The kid on the unicycle had brought it up with him from Parliament Station, which got me pondering if 2008′s bike ban applied to unicycles.
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3 comments
Making tracks
Why does Australia have problems with multiple rail gauges?
In summary, it seems to have gone like this:
- 1848: Everyone agreed to use standard gauge (4 ft 8.5 in).
- 1851: The Sydney Railway Company had a chief engineer who preferred broad gauge (5 ft 3 in), and convinced everyone to switch to that.
- 1854: The first line opens in Melbourne, to Sandridge (Port Melbourne), using broad gauge, as agreed.
- 1855: The Sydney Railway Company gets a new chief engineer, who lobbies against broad gauge, and convinces the NSW government to change its mind, and they open their first railway using standard gauge.
- 1856: South Australia opens their first line, using broad gauge.
And the mess went forward from there at the dizzying pace of the 1800s railway industry. By 1883, the Victorian broad gauge and NSW standard gauge lines met near the border at Albury. Meanwhile Queensland had gone with narrow gauge (3 ft 6 in), and met their NSW cousins at the border in 1888. WA also used narrow gauge, as did Tasmania and parts of SA.
(More detail and sources in Wikipedia.)
There was a break-of-gauge at Albury until 1962 when the new standard gauge line to Melbourne opened. Subsequently the Melbourne to Adelaide train the Overland shifted to standard gauge in 1995 when the Keating government standardised that line, mostly for the benefit of freight (under a project called “One Nation”!).
In the near future the V/Line trains to Albury will also switch to standard gauge. For now the other Seymour services through to Shepparton will remain on the present broad gauge line, though I wouldn’t be too surprised if they switch before too long. The Seymour line was the only one that didn’t get an infrastructure upgrade as part of the Regional Fast Rail project.
So, with the trend now towards standard gauge, wouldn’t it make sense to eventually convert everything, particularly the regional lines, to assist interstate rail freight in particular? And also to allow eventual high-speed interstate rail to use some existing tracks? Not necessarily as a priority of course, but eventually?
Probably. Which is why it’s puzzling that for the Regional Fast Rail project, they didn’t use gauge convertible sleepers. The sleepers can have extra holes added to aid conversion later for minimal cost. Given concrete sleepers can last 50-60-70 years, it would have made sense.
Neither are they doing so as they lay concrete sleepers on the suburban network. Sure, it’s not important right now, but why lock out the option for three generations?
Perhaps the lack of forward planning that got us into this mess in the first place is still around?
Tags: trains, transport
6 comments
The Kerang verdict
Just over two years after the accident, the verdict in the Kerang disaster case was returned yesterday. The truck driver was acquitted.
There’s no question over the fact that he was at the wheel, or what happened after impact. And we know that the crossings lights and bells worked, because the traffic coming the other way had stopped, and the lights could still be clearly seen flashing hours afterwards in the TV news footage.
The question wasn’t whether he failed to stop, but whether it was culpable driving. Reading some of the news stories, it seems the jury decided it was not, on the basis that he didn’t see the flashing lights and the train until too late — and that V/Line and others had actually asked for an upgrade of the crossing for some time before the crash because of poor visibility.
No infrastructure is perfect. It can’t save you from yourself if you’re inattentive. I think it’s a shame when people don’t take responsibility for their own actions. And I sincerely hope that others don’t take the lesson from this that it’s okay to behave recklessly around level crossings. The attitude towards them seems quite different to that towards other road hazards — and I wonder if this played a part in the verdict.
Indeed, I’m left wondering what the verdict would have been if instead of a railway crossing warning light and a passenger train, it had been a Give Way sign, and a school bus.
See also:
- My initial reaction to the Kerang crash
- Other bloggers reactions to the crash
- National Rail Safety Week is coming up soon
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