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.
End of week shorties
Had to laugh at the Indian protestor talking to Jon Faine on Monday who appeared to inadvertantly use the phrase “Too many chiefs, not enough Indians” (at about the 20:45 minute mark, using the ABC media player’s weird countdown system.)
I haven’t actually seen this week’s controversial Chaser episode yet. But judging from last week’s effort, I think the real problem with the Chaser this year is they’re going too far for cringe instead of for laughs. (The Mumbrella blog agrees.)
Oh, and it turns out that The Mansion on the Comedy Channel did the Chaser idea first. “Reasonable Request Foundation”.
It’s June, which means it’s stocktake sale season. I’m going to go looking to replace a pair of work shoes, a pair of runners (the Eccos have lasted 3.5 years), and my old Canon A70 camera (which is finally giving up the ghost after 6 years of good service). Where does one find all the catalogues and the best prices? Well, clicking on the Lasoo banner at the top of the web page would be a good start!
Speaking of shopping, here’s an interesting SMH article on loyalty cards — the real value to the retailer is what they find out about their customers. I’ve avoided such things in the past, but given I go to Safeway so much I don’t know what to do with all the fuel dockets I get (and often forget to take them with me when I do need to buy petrol), I might consider getting one.
So is it flexible, or not?
I’m sorry, I know I’m being terribly dim here, but these adverts:
Can someone explain what it means?
I appreciate that a physical printed bus timetable is generally made out of paper, and is therefore flexible.
But what with online timetables and journey planners, a lot of people never use a paper timetable anymore. Especially, I suspect, the target audience of this advert for mobile broadband.
What I think of when I see the phrase “bus timetable” is the schedule that the bus runs to. You can’t ring up the bus company and demand that they run more buses, or that they wait for you at the stop. Well, you can, but it won’t work. The timetable is decidedly inflexible.
So just what is Virgin getting at? Is it meant to be flexible, or isn’t it?
—
On the subject of journey planners, Google Transit has announced support for more cities, so by the end of June it will include Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, and Sydney’s light rail and monorail lines. Melbourne? Uhh… not so much. I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets here when I say that Metlink does have the data. Other factors are obviously involved.
PS. One form of Melbourne bus is a teensy bit flexible: Telebus services in the outer suburbs. And the Gowanbrae bus.
Oh, and while they haven’t got together with Google yet, kudos to Metlink for getting bus timetables out at most stops now. It’s been a long time coming.
What’s that got to do with the price of milk?
As part of my conversion to a cheapskate, I was comparing low-fat milks. For a while I’d been buying Pura Light Start or Rev. The supermarket brands are a lot cheaper, and maybe my taste buds are AWOL, but I can’t really detect a huge difference in taste.
But how do they stackup on nutrition? Lacking anything better to do, I decided to compare.
| per 100ml | Pura Light Start | Rev | Safeway low fat | Coles lite |
| Energy kJ | 183 | 191 | 193 | 193 |
| Protein gms | 3.6 | 3.4 | 3.3 | 3.3 |
| Fat - Total gms | 1.0 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.4 |
| Fat - Saturated gms | 0.6 | 0.8 | 0.9 | 0.9 |
| Carbohydrate gms | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 |
| Carbohydrate - sugars gms | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 |
| Sodium mg | 45 | 58 | 43 | 43 |
| Calcium mg | 126 | 126 | 124 | 114 |
| Cost per 2 litre carton | $4.37 | $4.69 | $2.79 | $2.99 |
I’ve listed the Safeway online prices here, with the Coles online price for the Coles milk. I haven’t checked the Aldi nutritional information, but their Farmdale light milk is $2.57 for two litres.
Nutrition-wise it appears the Pura Light Start has a bit less fat, but other than that it’s much of a muchness.
I find it amazing that Rev is so similar to the Safeway or Coles Lite milks, but there’s such a huge price difference. I doubt I could pick it in a taste test.
At least it’s all simpler than back in the day when it was Rev for me, Skinny Milk for her, and full-cream for the young-uns.
What milk(s) do the rest of you buy?
No more cigarettes
I was in the barber shop last week getting a hair cut. I’ve been going there for something like fifteen years, and things have changed little over that time.
One thing that used to be different is they had ash-trays in the waiting area to accomodate smokers. Those disappeared some years ago.
But now for the first time, they’ve stopped selling tobacco products.
While I got my hair cut I had a chat with the barber (one of the proprietor’s sons) about the reasons.
Less and less people are smoking. The market is shrinking. (Or dying, perhaps?)
The profit margin isn’t very high, as there’s a lot of competition, apparently.
Conversely the value of the stock is high, which means even for just a moderately-sized shop display, they had tens of thousands of dollars of cigarettes sitting there, which raised concerns over burglary.
And finally, the hassles of keeping track of stock, sorting out inventory and orders and so on are a big overhead, which I can relate to, having dealt with such issues during my retail experience.
So they stopped selling them.
And the moral dimension? He knew full well that smoking is an unhealthy, unpleasant, dangerous practice, but more practical considerations appear to have been the catalyst for the change.
This blog is sponsored by…
If you’re wondering, yes, the Lasoo.com.au banner advert is due to a sponsorship deal.
I was quite pleased to see they produced a graphic that fits in well with the blog — in a similar vein to my post last week on contextual advertising.
Lasoo is a web site that compiles and indexes retail catalogues — particularly handy for someone like me who has opted not to get them in my mailbox. Personally, I’ve used it in the past to find a good price on an iron, and when hunting for a specific birthday present.
I’m not going to go overboard in singing its praises just so you click through the banner, but it does seem to work well, and if you’re in Australia and ever, well, spend money, it’s worth a look.
Contextual advertising
Online it’s all about contextual advertising — figuring out what the viewer is interested in, then showing them ads they’ll hopefully like.
It frequently doesn’t work of course; Facebook knows everything about virtually everybody, but still manages to show me adverts for things I have no interest in.
In the offline world, contextual advertising is tricky. Doesn’t stop them having a go.
Check this.
I thought it was pretty funny. And they’ve obviously designed it for that specific spot, in that specific station, because someone at the advertising agency has noticed — the electronic sign on the other side doesn’t work. Bullseye.
This one though… was a bit off-target. Just a bit.
I guess some guy sitting in an office in North Sydney wasn’t to know the difference between a bus stop and a tram stop.
The car and the fridge
Just when I thought my finances were more-or-less under control, March brought a couple of major unexpected things breaking down.
Electric car windows are nice to have. But one stopped working a couple of weeks ago. This involved using sticky tape just to keep it from descending by itself and staying open to the weather. Cost to get it fixed? About $500. Turns out those car warranties provided by used-car dealers are pretty specific… if it’s a fault in the engine or otherwise making the car go, that’s fine, but windows? Nup. Ka-ching!
Then the fridge stopped last Thursday. The ice-cream melted. I tried the things suggested in the manual, in particular vacuumming around the back to clear the dust out. There was heaps of dust. So much dust it made clunking noises as it flew up the vacuum-cleaner tube.
It didn’t help. The repairman came on Tuesday to tell me it was the compressor. And it would cost five or six hundred dollars to fix. Sigh. (And there was a $95 charge just for the privilege of being told that.)
The points for getting it fixed: less cost than a new one; less waste of the rest of the fridge.
The points against: it’s already almost twelve years old; no guarantees something else wouldn’t break. And the clincher: he couldn’t do it that day anyway, and he wasn’t even sure if they had the parts in stock.
And I wanted a solution quickly, because using an esky with purchased ice in it works okay for a small amount of stuff, but is not my idea of fun.
So I decided to buy a new fridge. Turns out Choice in November had a survey of fridges, and my mum had the mag handy. Most of those at the top of their results are Fisher and Paykel. The repairman liked Westinghouse or Kelvinator (apparently both made by Electrolux). So I had a quick look online at prices and compared models.
Some things I learned about or otherwise considered:
- Old fridge 505 litres. It was actually too big. I’ve never used that much space. Time to downsize slightly, by perhaps 20% — no more.
- Old fridge had freezer at bottom. Choice notes that this is a tad more convenient, but less energy efficient, by about 10% it looks like.
- Mind you, freezer at the bottom models all seem to have a higher proportion of freezer space, which may be important for some people.
- I didn’t want stainless steel, or lots of gadgetry. As the repairman reckoned, just more things to break down.
I spotted a good price on a Westinghouse in The Good Guys catalogue, and went looking, aiming to buy that day. Unfortunately I couldn’t find their Brighton store temporary (due to a fire or something) address, in no small part because their web site map claimed they were near JB Hifi.
I did find Retravision instead, who had a nice F+P model at the right size, also on sale. Checked if they could deliver it quickly, and they said yes.
Sold. Plus delivery fee, and extended warranty, about $1300. Ka-ching.
No wonder I think I’m broke. (I suppose I could have looked for something on eBay, but like I said, I wanted this problem fixed fast, and hopefully it goes for at least another twelve years before I have any problems.) I’m not really broke of course, but months like this, with major expenses, mean the things that I had on the plan for the house go temporarily out the window. It’s enough to want a session in the scream chamber.
I actually thought the washing machine would be the next to stop. It’s about 15 years old and has started making a more noise during the spin cycle than it used to.
Oh, I didn’t check where the fridge was made before I bought it. All other things being equal, obviously nice to buy Australian made and support local jobs. Turns out it was made at Fisher and Paykel’s factory in Cleveland, Qld… which was due to close last month.
PS. Dear Good Guys, your web site map being wrong lost you that sale. (I’ve let them know.)
