Brisbane
Going to Brisbane soon. Have some plans, but suggestions welcome, especially teenager-friendly places to have dinner or near the CBD.
(Very disappointed to be missing the Emulator retro games exhibition. Ah well.)
Tags: Brisbane
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We lost power last night in the storm
Things I learnt when we lost power:
Take-away pizza by torchlight a bad way to have dinner.
A Smart Meter won’t keep the juice flowing if there’s problems in the local distribution network.
I don’t have enough torches. At least one per person would be good.
The Dolphin mini LED torch I got recently is really good. Will get a couple more of these I think.
Thank goodness for mobile internet, and having a phone that still has a charge in it.
If you’re not sure who your electricity distribution company is, try the list here.
The United Energy Distribution web site is quite good, and accessible via a Smart phone. It shows you maps of the affected area and so on, but is not to be trusted entirely — our area vanished off the list when their estimated recovery time of 8pm passed.
The UED phone service was more candid, with a more up-to-date (?) estimate of after midnight.
The early night didn’t do us any harm. I was glad to get the extra sleep.
Questions I still have:
If the power was off from about 4pm, until sometime overnight (perhaps up to 12 hours)… is the stuff that was in the fridge still okay? The milk seems to be all right (as far as I can smell), but what about frozen food?
PS. Jeremy noticed that some ice that had been loose in a container was still frozen and loose; eg it hadn’t even melted enough to stick together, let alone into water and then frozen again. Which to me suggests all the food should be fine, as (in the freezer especially) the temperature never got very high.
New camera
After much procrastination, I got a new camera. It’s a Canon IXUS 115, to replace the old Canon A70 I got way back in 2003. The old one still just about works (with minor problems), so I figured Canon was deserving of my loyalty. (My 4-ish year old Canon MP610 printer/scanner is going strong too.)
At the time I bought it, I thought the A70 was small. This is much smaller — about as small as I’d want. I did consider getting an SLR (the EOS1100 with lens is only about $500 now through Kogan), but decided I wanted portability over super-dooper features. And the IXUS 115 has quite a few features anyway, including slow-motion movie recording, which already the kids and I have been having fun with.
Back when I bought the A70, it was at JB Hifi through a friend of a friend who worked there. Coincidentally I did this again — at a different JB Hifi, through different friends. Said friend of friend admitted that Canon’s build quality isn’t as good as it once was — the race to cost-cut makes this inevitable I suppose — but at a third of the price of the old camera, and demonstrably better photos (well, eight years later, it’d have to be, wouldn’t it) I’m still happy with it so far. Will be interesting to see if it lasts as long.
Here’s a selection of photos taken at lunchtime yesterday, all using the Auto setting — haven’t figured out all the controls yet.
(Zoom) — This one was at maximum optical zoom, cropped, sharpened and darkened a tad.
(Zoom) — Just a crop and slight sharpen on this one.
(Zoom) — Just cropped.
By the way, what a shame Flickr isn’t a bit more flexible with its embedding. The 640 pixels across size is great for me using this blog template, but it has problems with it if the photo is taller than it is wide (as two of these are) — then it gives you the choice by height instead, so you only get 640 pixels across if the photo height is 1.6 times the width (eg you’re choosing 1024 pixels high).
Tags: cameras, Canon, Photos
5 comments
What can’t you buy in the city? Petrol.
The CBD (to be precise, the Hoddle Grid) has just about every business imagineable, except one.
Petrol stations.
At least, as far as I can tell from searches of Yellow Pages and Google Maps, though the latter incorrectly identified one at 114 Flinders Street.
To fill up a car, you have to go to Victoria Parade, just outside the Hoddle Grid, or to City Road or Kingsway. Everyone seems to manage — though a Herald Sun article last week noted that fuel prices are often now higher in Melbourne than in regional areas. (One lady quoted spends $150 a week on petrol. Jeez; I wonder if she has any choice but to drive everywhere.)
Gordon Price notes, when writing about petrol stations in Vancouver:
As oil companies have consolidated and gotten out of the retail end of the business, those prime sites with high values, offering a product with low mark-up, were worth way more as real estate. And so the number of stations in Canada has been dropping by about a thousand a year.
I wonder if the numbers of petrol stations are also dropping here — though I note I can’t remember a time when there was a petrol station within the Hoddle Grid. Has it been the case in recent times?
Sticky tape and wire keeping the City Loop signalling system working?
Speaking of City Loop safety issues, is this what’s keeping the signalling system working? Bits of sticky tape and wire?
Hopefully this is just something temporary.
(Pic snapped this morning thanks to a stop-start trip from Richmond to Flinders Street)
Tags: public transport, trains
3 comments
In the good old days
One of the persistent myths is that in the “good old days”, before trains and trams had locked doors, nobody ever fell out.
When the old VR ran the suburban network trains, and stations were manned and had barrier gates, trains had a lot of doors and it was never a problem. Nobody fell out either, people were RESPONSIBLE for their actions way back then.
This is patently untrue.
Exhibit 1
A search of the National Library’s “Trove” archive of newspapers for train fell out finds scores of cases from around Australia, some fatal, some causing only minor injuries, some adults, some little kids.
FALL FROM TRAIN.
Man Sustains Concussion.Thomas M. Hassett, aged 51 years, of Holt street, Richmond, fell out of a train near Werribee on Saturday morning, while leaning out of a door. The train was immediately stopped, and the train crew ran back to where Hassett was lying on the side of the line. He was placed on the train and taken to the Spencer street station. An ambulance then transferred him to the Melbourne Hospital, where he was admitted with concussion and several broken ribs.
A search for tram fell out also finds many cases.
Exhibit 2
The Brisbane tramway museum has a page about fatal tram accidents; they found a register of what appears to be all of them from Brisbane’s tramway history, from 1897 to 1969 (a few years after trams had been converted to buses).
Their attempted categorisation of the data (it’s not easy to do apparently) concluded that amongst 509 deaths over 70-odd years, 64 were due to “Falls from moving trams”, 59 were from “Alighting from moving trams”, and 25 “Boarding moving trams”.
(The biggest categories were “Collisions with motor vehicles” 110 and “Pedestrians knocked down” 118.)
Nostalgia
Many of us fondly remember summer days, riding in trams and trains with the doors and windows open, the cool air blowing through. Many of us fondly remember stepping out onto the running board of trams, jumping off before the tram had come to a stop.
(Less pleasantly, I recall as late as about 1995, riding a V/Line H-set on the Ballarat line, and people kept leaving the double-doors open, leaving a huge gaping doorway that anybody could have easily fallen out of if the train had been moderately crowded.)
Sure, there’s nostalgia. But the reality is there were accidents, people were injured or killed, and the quest for better safety is a worthy one.
Qantas: nasty or nice?
Is it just me that thinks this Qantas ad looks a little like the Q bloke is being a meanie, hiding the teddy bears from the kids?
Tags: advertising, Qantas
9 comments
Nine carriage trains – could they work?
Today’s Herald Sun raises an issue that has been pondered for some time: 9 carriage trains to relieve overcrowding.
This would seem like a good opportunity to dig out my Bargearse remake video.
The reasoning behind adding carriages is that it’s close to becoming impractical to add more trains in peak onto the busiest lines, such as the Pakenham line, so they should make the trains longer instead.
Obviously they’d need to adjust signals and sidings, and make platforms longer. The question would be: can they make enough platforms longer that the trains could stop at the right places to take the bulk of the passenger load?
Let’s assume they couldn’t do the City Loop underground stations because of cost, but they could do Flinders Street and Southern Cross, which would connect much (but not all) of the CBD directly. Let’s also assume they would do Richmond (extensive connections) and South Yarra (which is increasingly becoming a major destination, as well as a big source of passengers) but that trains would skip the quieter stations on the line.
If, say, you lengthened platforms at the following: Caulfield (9791 boardings per weekday), Oakleigh (6820), Dandenong (6687), Springvale (5572), Noble Park (4554), Clayton (4323) and Huntingdale (4267). That’s about 42,000 weekday boardings. The remaining stops have about 22,000, so those 7 stations account for 65% of boardings.
Of course, this is making the assumption that the majority of people boarding from those stations that might get the longer platforms would also be travelling to other stations that would get them.
Obviously a lot more detailed analysis is needed. But it does mean that maybe, just maybe, “super-sized” trains stopping only at specific high-traffic stations might actually work. (Though of course the more stations they stop at, the more patronage they’d pick up, and the less the express running would reduce track capacity for other services.)
On the other hand, it might be easier to try double-deck trains again. Okay they’d have longer dwell times, but at least they could use the City Loop, and they don’t necessarily have to have only two doors per carriage side — Paris’s RER line A has trains with three doors per carriage side.
Upgrading signalling, grade separation and/or track expansion, and more off-peak trains (to spread the peak load) are also no doubt under consideration.
