Bananas
Yesterday on the way to work I saw two people, both of whom were carrying nothing more than a banana.
Is this the done thing nowadays? In this time of expensive bananas, it is some kind of status symbol or something?
Tags: bananas
8 comments
They’re not Smart Meters anymore, they’re Advanced Meters
They finally installed a new electricity meter at my house. This was after receiving three sets of letters saying “we’re about to install it”.
It wasn’t one of those much-criticised allegedly-defective Smart Meters though — oh no, it was an Advanced Meter. So much better.
Will be interested to see what effect it has on the next power bill.
Tags: electricity, home, SmartMeters
6 comments
A year since Dad left us
It’s a year today since Dad passed-away.
It’s got easier to deal with and think about as the months have passed. Life goes on. But yes, today (and on the 7th, which would have been his 80th birthday), I did find myself in contemplation.
Doubly so when a $7 refund cheque for him for a cancelled utility arrived recently.
His influence is still felt, and he is remembered fondly.
As my sister said so much more eloquently than I:
A year goes by quickly. Hope you are getting in good reading in the great library in the sky, Dad.
Tags: anniversaries, Dad
2 comments
An end to secret tramways business
One day in 2008, Marita and I went to a party, and I blogged about the trip there on mysterious tram route number 7. I concluded:
In my book, in most cases the secret numbers shouldn’t be used. If a tram is travelling along a substantial part of the route, it might as well use the same route number. Most people won’t care that it doesn’t make it quite all the way. Or it could use a suffix such as D for Depot — though that would probably require the few 3 digit route numbers to be cropped back to two for simplicity.
I should probably point out at this point that my personal views do not necessarily represent PTUA policy, but they did in this case, and the Sunday Age got interested in the story.
Age 14/9/2008: On our tramway’s secret service. Yarra Trams said they wouldn’t be changing anything, and noted the rather astounding (I think) statistic:
they account for 10% of the kilometres that Melbourne’s trams travel each day and 8% of the network’s travel time.
In 2009 I noted that in Collins Street the problem was getting worse, with tram routes 29 and 47 both running to Kew Depot, but via different routes.
Fast-forward to 2011. It was highlighted again in May via the PTUA’s Problem Of The Day:
It’s hard enough navigating public transport without throwing in mystery route numbers. There are dozens of them on the tram network — not on maps, not in the timetables.
A new operator took over in late-2009, and unlike their predecessors, they are interested in this issue, and getting rid of obscure route numbers which barely anybody knows about, and bear no resemblance to their parent routes. (Whether or not it had gained media attention, one would hope it would be an aspect of operations they would have reviewed when taking over.)
Yesterday via an Age article, they announced they’ll begin to phase them out. The press release provided more detail:
Mysterious route numbers such as 81, 121, 77 and 92 will be phased out to help passengers to get to their destination on the next available tram.
The so-called phantom routes do not appear on the network map or timetables. They are services that are necessary to get trams to and from depots or to reposition them on the network.
…This route renumbering initiative will make catching these services much easier. The new route identification format for these services will feature their parent route and the letter ‘a’ or ‘d’.
…The letter ‘d’ means the tram terminates at the ‘depot.’
The letter ‘a’ means the service is ‘altered’ and is not running the full length of the route.
It’s a small thing, but a worthwhile exercise to make that underused 10% of tram service kilometres more useful to people. Bravo, Yarra Trams.
Tags: trams, Yarra Trams
3 comments
“LOL” juice? Seriously?
Tropkl. Razz bri. B current.
Good grief.
Tags: LOL juice, net speak
5 comments
Unwanted phone calls, and a higher premium? Youi insurance FAIL
Got my car insurance renewal from Bingle. $375.10. I’ve had it there since 2009.
Thought I’d quickly look around at insurers known to take low car usage into account.
PayAsYouDrive… whipped through the form, and it came up with $426.50 for the minimum 5000 kms per year of driving. A more conservative 7000 kms came back as $477.80. So they’re out. (By the way, their web site has improved since the problems I had with it in 2009, which at the time prompted them to respond on my blog. But it doesn’t appear to cater for anything other than a policy starting today, even though I was already currently insured. Odd.)
Youi. Asked for a mobile number to send me a PIN. Annoying, but they say it’s to prevent robots getting into their system. Not sure I believe that, but ok, I went through web form, got to the end and…
…it announced I’m a “preferred customer”, and, without giving me the option: one of our highly skilled advisors is busy calling you right now to finalise your quote.
Sure enough the guy rang up a minute later.
I was cranky. I didn’t want a phone call. I hate making phone calls about insurance, and I don’t have the time. That’s why I used the web site. Heck, this type of transaction is what web sites are made for.
I told the guy so, and asked him to pass that on to his management, and I reluctantly agreed to have him ring back later. (5-6 minutes on the phone, he promised.) After all, perhaps it would be cheaper than Bingle… though it would need to be a significant amount to overcome the inconvenience of the phone call, and the deceptive web site.
You know what Youi, you’re not getting off to a good start on the whole customer-relationship front. If I’d wanted to discuss it on the phone, I would have clicked the “Quote by phone” button instead of the “Quote online” button.
So anyway, I took the subsequent call. The bloke was polite, quick and professional, but the questions included nothing they couldn’t have asked online.
Except this: he asked who I was currently with, and what their premium was. He said Bingle is a hard one to compete with, and Youi’s cover is better, with more benefits (which may well be true, but what do I care if I have never ever claimed, and drive so little that, touch wood, I’ll never have to?)…
Here’s the kicker: He said that the best premium they could offer me is $466.85.
Yes, after all that, after wasting my time with an unwanted phone call, Youi was $91.75 higher than Bingle.
I think at this point you can guess who’s getting my money.
Did some see the London riots coming?
Terrible scenes in England. What started peacefully seems to have descended into pure opportunism from troublemakers.
Did anybody see it coming? Well check this fascinating article from The Guardian, a week ago:
Farewell youth clubs, hello street life – and gang warfare
With budget cuts leading to the loss of facilities that kept many inner-city youths occupied, experts predict a rise in crime
…Others worry that a perfect storm of unemployment, the withdrawal of the Education Maintenance Allowance and a squeeze on programmes to help disadvantaged youths could bring more than just a rise in crime figures and result in a “lost generation”.
…“Services are not just being taken away from young people, they are being taken from poor young people,” [Professor John Pitts] said.
“At a simple level that could mean an increase in antisocial behaviour and vandalism.”
Not that the budget cuts necessarily led directly to the riots of course, but I bet it didn’t help. Take away services like that from areas with serious social problems, and you can see how there might be consequences.
And it does leave me wondering how much money was saved in cutting services for disaffected youth, and how much more will be spent by the government bringing London and other cities back under control.
People are responsible for their own actions of course. But whether you consider these types of schemes to be improving community ties, bettering people, or merely a distraction from more destructive activities, they would appear to be a better investment than was apparent to those who cut them.
* * *
- Contrary to reports of rioters organising themselves via Twitter, it appears Blackberries are in fact the preferred method. Twitter, however, has proven central to the cleanup and recovery.
- Pictures from The Age and the Boston Globe Big Picture (Number 23 is particularly sobering)
- One brave Hackney woman confronts the rioters
Tags: London, riots, youth
5 comments
Nostalgia overload: Back in the 80s…
I was telling the kids about the days when arcade games were ubiquitous.
When we lived in Pine Avenue, Elwood in the early 80s, the local milkbar on Ormond Road had a Donkey Kong Junior machine, for instance.
But a short bus ride away in St Kilda was video game heaven. For starters, Luna Park (which in Melbourne was and is free to enter; unlike Sydney, you only pay for the rides), had a shed full of video games next to the Ghost Train.
In there I remember pumping my 20 cent coins into machines playing Donkey Kong, Popeye, Frogger, Elevator Action and Space Invaders. The latter was black and white, but with a colour overlay to give it a multi-coloured background.
A short walk down Carlisle Street was a laundromat with a Moon Patrol machine. The laundromat is still there, but these days shares the premises with solarium. Sign of the times?
Moon Patrol in the laundromat was great fun, for two reasons: firstly the machine was not in great demand, so there was rarely a queue. (The etiquette in those days was that if you wanted to play the machine next, you’d put your 20 cent coin on it; there was usually a spot where the screen met the console where a coin could be placed and it wouldn’t roll away.)
Secondly, it was one of the earliest games which would allow you to continue playing after losing all your lives, by putting in another coin. While I wasn’t the world’s best Moon Patrol player by any means, this meant that for 40-60 cents I could play right through the course (which went from A to Z), whereupon it would go back to the start, but with extra difficulty. Great fun.
Further down Carlisle Street, at the corner of Barkly Street, was a takeaway place with a Galaga machine. The takeaway place (or its descendant) still appears to be on the same corner. On my trip home from school in year 7 and 8, I’d often change from the tram to the bus at this spot, and play Galaga while I waited.
Other highlights around that part of St Kilda for a teenage geek included the computer shop on Barkly Street between which sold clone disk drives for the Commodore 64 (the Skai 64 drive, which I had, but which seems to have virtually faded into obscurity) and the two local newsagents on Acland Street, which sold all my favourite imported computer magazines, such as Commodore User, Compute’s Gazzette, Zzap 64! and later (when I switched allegiences from the Commodore 64 to a BBC Micro) Acorn User and The Micro User. Later when these publications got less mainstream, I ended up having to go into McGills (also now defunct) in the city to get them.
Further afield were Timezone in the City (apparently there are still a few of these around) and of course the Fun Factory in South Yarra (likely to be redeveloped in the not-too-distant future), where I sometimes played after school once I’d gone to Melbourne High… not to mention that one year rollerskating (also at the Fun Factory) was offered as a sport. I recall they had Joust, Gauntlet (great with four players), Gyruss and Dragon’s Lair (never my favourite).
There was also a place in Balaclava next to the railway bridge which, I recall, was called Sam’s Amusements. Mostly pool tables I think. They may well have had arcade games in there, but it looked way too scary, and I never went in there.
You may have worked out by now that I’m enormously nostalgic for the video games of this period. As it turns out, there’s a place in South Melbourne that sells multi-game versions of the old arcade games, in pretty authentic-looking cabinets, and there are others around Australia where you can buy them from about $1200 upwards. One day, maybe.
In the mean time, there’s always MAME.
