Categories
music

The Long And Winding Road

Call me slow, but I just figured out why I never used to be that keen on The Long And Winding Road but how recently I’ve come to like it — and even find it quite emotional. It’s not just because I’m getting old. It’s because for years all I had was the original version  ... [More]

Categories
Geek Net

Shaped! Oh the humanity!

My Internet access account got shaped on Sunday afternoon, for the last day-and-a-half of the billing cycle, as we apparently burnt through 30 Gb (peak) in the month. No big deal — it may just mean Youtube is unbearably slow for 36 hours, and I’ll have to curb my practice of having lots of browser  ... [More]

Categories
Sport Video games

New Wii tennis?

Wow, they’ve really improved the graphics on Wii tennis.

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
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]

Categories
Consumerism TV

Franco Cozzo

If you’re ever at Footscray Station on the footbridge (the one they’re going to have to knock down extend, even though they just built it), and you look towards the east, you’ll see something from a bygone era. You might just be able to make out the words “Franco Cozzo” on an off-white building in  ... [More]

Categories
Net Retrospectives transport

Retired

The other day I retired one of my oldest web pages, an FAQ on Melbourne public transport. It started life (I think around 1993, before the Web was around) as a Usenet FAQ for the misc.transport.urban-transit group. In 1994 it was posted (with an incomplete attempt to convert it to HTML) on Railpage — where  ... [More]

Categories
Film TV

Grainy vs smooth

From the popup text of the comic reproduced below: We’re also stuck with blurry, juddery, slow-panning 24fps movies forever because (thanks to 60fps home video) people associate high framerates with camcorders and cheap sitcoms, and thus think good framerates look ‘fake’. The first DVD I played on my old Loewe TV when I got it  ... [More]

Categories
Film

Tron (and why home theatre is so popular)

I don’t see a lot of movies in the cinema, so call me slow if you like, but I think I’ve worked out why big TVs and DVDs and Bluray are getting so popular. Freaking $18.50 for an adult, $13.50 for kids? (And this is at 10am on a weekday — I don’t know if  ... [More]

Categories
Consumerism TV

New television?

I’ve been thinking for a while about updating my television (a 68cm Loewe CRT, non-widescreen, analogue) to a shiny new digital number. People who know more about this stuff than I suggested I look at Samsung’s offerings. I know I’ve had two Samsung computer monitors for years which haven’t missed a blip, so I took  ... [More]

Categories
driving Video games

Coolest Mini ever

Spotted in Centre Road, Bentleigh: