Categories
Food'n'drink

Spam-flavoured macadamias

My kids were in Hawaii over Christmas with their mum for a family get together. They looked for something uniquely Hawaiian to bring me back, and settled on this. I love getting a souvenir that is truly unique to a place. It’s just as is labelled on the can. They’re macadamias, but they’re spam-flavoured. Who  ... [More]

Categories
TV

Getting rid of old TVs

Seems like half of Melbourne has got a new flat screen TV or computer monitor, judging from the number of CRTs left around the streets. In my view, you shouldn’t just dump them on the nature strip. Assuming it’s working, ask around to see if a charity somewhere wants it. Or list it on Freecycle  ... [More]

Categories
music Retrospectives TV

Butterfly ball (Love is all)

My recollection is this clip used to pop up on the ABC when they had five minutes to fill. Nowadays they’d probably just run a bunch of promos and adverts for the ABC Shop. The song is actually called “Love Is All”, from The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. I can’t make it along,  ... [More]

Categories
transport

The last Metcard

I was an early adopter of Myki, if only to see the problems it’s had first hand. But since I started using it, I’ve still carried a Metcard in my wallet. The last Metcard. A 10×2 hour zone 2, for my occasional forays into zone 2 — used on days I was only going into  ... [More]

Categories
Food'n'drink

Aussie Aussie Aussie

Go on then, name me something more Aussie than kangaroo sausages on the barbecue? To be honest I haven’t previously been that keen on the kanga bangers when grilled or fried. But BBQ makes everything taste better… right? Update 4pm. Amusingly given Tony’s comment, I flipped on the TV while I was eating and found  ... [More]

Categories
Bentleigh

Double awesome!

Damn! Double the awesomeness, and I missed it. Seems like specifying the suburb name was an afterthought… and I wonder if there was a re-scheduling.

Categories
transport

First!

It appears I was the first person to successfully use the Myki vending machine at Bentleigh station, back on the first of last year. Hardly surprising as few people in Melbourne had a card at that point. And this afternoon I got Sales Transaction ID number 3370, when I dumped a bunch of change onto  ... [More]

Categories
Food'n'drink

Cheese slices

Kath Lockett found some old adverts, including this one: We sometimes had these cheese slices when I was a kid. It must have been my early computer-geek (binary) mind at work, but I would eat them by folding them in half, so one half broke off, eating that, then repeating with the half that was  ... [More]

Categories
transport

New timetables in May

A few details have come out about the next lot of Metro train timetables, and there’s some big changes for some lines, as the process of completely re-writing them continues. Here is a summary based on some notes I saw the other day, and my initial thoughts. My assumption is these notes apply on weekdays  ... [More]

Categories
transport

Spotted

Spotted around the RACV centre in Bourke Street… I’m not sure what these things are called. They’re from the days before traffic lights — before my time. The only problem with these ones is that two directions are getting a green signal at once, which would result in a crash. This street sign looks a  ... [More]

Categories
transport

Myki on buses

Two weeks ago I noted that Myki mostly works. In most cases the charging is fine. The readers seem more reliable and mostly fairly responsive (and faster than inserting a Metcard into a slot and waiting for it to come out again). What doesn’t work? Well buses in particular have issues, it seems. As this  ... [More]

Categories
Culture Melbourne

Brickvention 2009

I’m hearing that there are incredibly long queues for Brickvention today at Melbourne Town Hall. Shame… when we went in 2009, the queues weren’t too bad. Perhaps they’ve become a bigger event than they realise. (According to the web site 1000 members of the public attended in 2009, and 2700 in 2010. Clearly it’s growing.)  ... [More]