One artist challenge
I’m only doing this ‘cos (a) Rae tagged me (a while back) and (b) I had a smartarse answer for the first question.
The ONE ARTIST Challenge !
Choosing only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people you like and include me. You can’t use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It’s a lot harder than you think!
Pick Your Artist:
The Who
Are you a male or female:
I’m a Boy
Describe yourself:
Helpless Dancer (maybe more hopeless, actually)
How do you feel:
Happy Jack
Describe where you currently live:
Tommy’s Holiday Camp
If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere
Your favorite form of transportation:
Magic Bus
Your best friend is:
Doctor Jimmy
You and your best friends are:
My Generation
What’s the weather like:
Summertime Blues
What’s your favorite time:
Blue, Red and Grey
If your life were a tv show, what would it be called:
Sensation
What is life to you:
One Life’s Enough
Your current relationship:
Amazing Journey
Your fear:
Who Are You?
What is the best advice you have to give:
Baby, Don’t You Do It
Thought for the Day:
I’ve Had Enough
How I would like to die:
Shakin’ All Over
My soul’s present condition:
I Can’t Explain
My motto:
Won’t Get Fooled Again
Anybody else care to have a go?
Tags: memes rule, music, pass it on, The Who
5 comments
KRudd quoting Twitter
Nice to see the Prime Minister quoting a Twitter post in parliament, but jeez — reading it off a printout? Surely his staffers could have sent it to him on his Blackberry or something so he looked at least a little tech-savvy.
(via Mumbrella)
Tags: Kevin Rudd, parliament, Twitter
1 comment
The monthly refueling
Tomorrow it will be a month since I last filled up the car with petrol. The tank is almost empty now; I’ll fill it up again tonight.
Generally I just fill it up when it’s getting lowish and it’s convenient. Given my consumption isn’t high, I don’t bother to shop around, and if I see the queue is long, I look for another petrol station.
My new car is more efficient than my old car. I know this because while both have about a 50 litre tank, I used to fill up the old car with petrol about every 2-3 weeks; now it’s about every 3-4 weeks, and the amount of driving I do is roughly the same as it was then.
Another totally unscientific measure of consumption: I reset the tripometer the last time I filled up. Based on how far I’d travelled by the time it got to half-full, then quarter-full, and now almost empty, I can drive about 500 km on a 50 litre tank, which seems pretty good.
Mind you, that makes 10 litres per 100 km, which is a fair bit above the theoretical 7.6 figure in the Green Vehicle Guide. (I had to use the Astra Classic figure, as the GVG only covers post-2003 cars, and annoyingly the older Fuel Consumption database at greenhouse.gov.au has gone offline.)
I guess that means that (a) theoretical figures are just that, theoretical, and (b) I can probably learn to drive more efficiently.
Update Thursday night: Of course, my relaxed petrol buying strategy means I paid 10 cents per litre more today than I would have done yesterday. Mind you, long queues yesterday, none today.
Tags: cars, driving, petrol
8 comments
Walkability (again)
In some cities, they argue about whether or not streets should have footpaths. Thankfully not so much here.
Of course, for people to walk, they need somewhere to walk to.
An article in the local paper a few weeks ago highlighted the low Walkscores for some suburbs against others: Heatherton was the lowest in the area with a score of just 14.
Nearby Dingley (37 out of 100), Oakleigh South (38), Clarinda (34) and Clayton South (37) don’t fare much better.
…Ormond, McKinnon, Bentleigh, Cheltenham, Highett and Moorabbin all scored between 71 and 80 – classifying them as “very walkable”.
It’s no coincidence that the most walkable suburbs are all those on the railway lines. They were all first developed at a time before most people had cars, which meant transport had to be provided, and shopping centres grew up around them and have (well, mostly) remained vibrant places providing the kinds of services that Walkscore evaluates.
Malcolms Real Estate CEO Frank Hellier said a position within strolling distance of shops and services could add as much as 10 per cent to the price of a house.
Interestingly Walkscore is quoting a study which says that “one point of Walk Score is worth as much as $3,000 (US) depending on the metro area”.
I think that when you throw in access to high quality public transport (by which I mean trams or trains), which is probably present in most walkable suburbs anyway (at least in Melbourne), there’s definitely a premium, and I suspect it’s a lot more than 10 per cent. I know I was willing to pay dearly for it.
As they say: Location, location, location.
Tags: suburbs, walking, Walkscore
8 comments
Print’s not dead yet
If you’ve wondered how many people read the magazines you see in the newsagent, here’s the figures.
The only magazine I subscribe to, Australian Personal Computer, is sitting at 34,111, down 8% in the last year. Perhaps IT-related mags are more likely to be dropping with competition from online, though what caught my eye was that the one that’s lost the second highest percentage of readers in the past year, the AFL Record, down 25%.
When I was a kid you bought the Record every time you went to the footy. Do people not buy it anymore? Maybe kids don’t try and fill in the stats themselves these days.
Some magazines are gaining readers, which I guess shows that print is not quite dead yet.
And if you were wondering how Woman’s Day and Woman’s Weekly can afford to put all those annoying adverts on the telly, wonder no more — they’ve got the highest readership figures of anything in the list.
And can you believe that 302,000 people read That’s Life?!?
Tags: magazines, Media
6 comments
Doctor Who goes mainstream
You know a TV show has gone mainstream when you see a t-shirt for it in the window of Target (as well as having its DVDs advertised on phone boxes).
Tags: Doctor Who, t-shirts, Target
2 comments
Shopping around for insurance
As I noted in March, a bunch of my annual expenses fall together. This is a consequence of having bought both my house and my car in the month of August. Apart from the insurance on both of them, the car rego also happens to fall in August.
I had been pondering why my home and contents insurance renewal cost was so expensive. This in turn led me to wondering if the contents was actually worth insuring. Sure there’s the fire risk, but in terms of theft, I have very little that is (a) worth very much and is (b) likely to be stolen.
Instead of just blindly renewing like I have previously, I shopped around and to my surprise found that AAMI gave me an online quote that was about half the price I’d been paying. I seem to recall that the old company I’d been going through had stopped taking on new policies, and my assumption now is that they were trying to price themselves out of the market. Well it’s worked on me. Presto, $400 saved!
Last year I needed car insurance in a hurry, and went with AAMI (which will cost me $545 to renew), noting that when I had more time, being someone who uses his car less than most, I’d check out Pay As You Drive.
I really like PAYD as a theory. But the problem with their web site is that it can’t handle someone like me who three days per week parks his car in a street near a railway station. They’re web site wants an exact address. I queried this via their online form and they said to ring them up to get a quote.
I suppose insurance is all about risk, but do they really take into account this level of detail when calculating the premium? Wouldn’t a postcode be sufficient? In any case I hate ringing up companies and spending time on the phone because their web sites are broken like this, so I keyed in a guess as to where I might park to get an indicative quote. It came out at $385, based on 8000 km of driving for the year, which is my best guess at the moment.
Then I got a quote off Bingle, which is actually an online-only budget subsidiary of AAMI. (Online-only and budget suits me fine give I’ve never had to make a claim.) It came out at $462, with unlimited kms, and no getting fussy about where you park in the daytime.
How busy am I this week, and how much do I hate dealing with this stuff over the phone? Well I’ve got a few more days to get it organised, but if I don’t have the time to make the call, I suspect the answer will be $77.
Update lunchtime: I went back into the Bingle online quote and confirmed the details (and possibly added some stuff that wasn’t in the preliminary quote) and to my surprise the premium dropped to $418.66. It may have been because I originally said I bought it less than 12 months ago, but it turned out to the web site this means since September 2008. Since I bought it in August, this appears to count as more than 12 months go… perhaps having owned the car for longer and not having claimed means lower risk? Oh well, whatever. Sold!
Tags: car, home, insurance
7 comments
Never pay retail
Costco at Docklands in Melbourne opens today at 8am. I’ll be very interested to hear how it goes, but I’m not going to be rushing in to cough up my $60 to join up and start doing my shopping there.
For one thing I’ve realised that if one is prepared to be brand-agnostic, keep an eye on the specials, and (moderately) stock up when possible, it would appear that there’s no real reason to ever pay retail price on many groceries. Perhaps it’s due to the newish competition from Aldi, but it seems like brand names of most staples are heavily discounted at either Coles or Safeway most weeks of the year.
Take, for example, bread of the Helga’s, Noble Rise and Aldi’s Baker’s Taste range. In my book, all acceptable for lunches, toast, jaffles etc. The Aldi product sells for $2.99, so let’s assume for the sake of argument that $3 is a reasonable amount to pay.
Helga’s and Noble Rise retail for about $4.50 per loaf, but regularly on special for about $3 (or often $6 for two — chuck one in the freezer) at Coles or Safeway. This week that deal is on offer at Coles for Helga’s.
So while one could go and pay $4.50 for a loaf of nice-ish bread, with a little forward planning and watching the specials, it doesn’t seem like you’d need to pay more than $3 — 33% cheaper than the “regular” retail price.
I don’t get the catalogues in the junk mail at home anymore, but happily they’re all online: Coles; Safeway/Woolworths; Aldi. IGA has a web site, but hasn’t got specials on it.
Mind you, most of the online catalogues don’t appear until the week they’re valid, whereas the paper ones seem to get distributed a few days earlier, which would help with forward planning.
It’ll be interesting to see how the prices at Costco stack up.
- This Melburnian checked out Costco membership and blogged about it.
- Lifehacker last week had an article on 5 things you should never pay full price for.
- My previous post on milk prices
- Update Tuesday: My shopping experience at Costco Melbourne @ Docklands — from the blogger above
