A lot of the unfortunate jellybean characters are depicted around CBD railway stations at the moment as part of Metro’s Dumb Ways To Die campaign. I was amused at the placement of this one: …but this one is even better. (Only a short video — don’t bother with the sound; it adds nothing.) Perhaps I’m ... [More]
It’s inevitable that the passing of Margaret Thatcher would provoke mixed responses. Such polarising figures often do. She may have been a trailblazer for women in power in the western world, but I don’t remember her time as Prime Minister fondly. I was young and perhaps it was a naive viewpoint, but I remember the ... [More]
Ten years ago this week I got my first digital camera: a Canon A70. I’d held on until the price seemed right and they did a half-decent job of video recording (as my old Video-8 video camera had given up the ghost a couple of years before). I assume I only started with a fairly ... [More]
“We spoke to Infrastructure Australia and their advice was that the most pressing road priority in Melbourne was the east-west link,” Mr Abbott told reporters in Frankston on Thursday. “Now the Commonwealth government has a long history of funding roads. We have no history of funding urban rail and I think it’s important that we ... [More]
Those who have been paying attention might have noticed that the episode synopses for Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell (seen for instance in the Electronic Programme Guide on most TVs) have been getting weirder and weirder. Courtesy of the ABC TV web site, here’s a summary of them this year so far (including the next ... [More]
20 odd years ago, when I was into music videos (and television in general), I used to regularly record (yes, on VHS) a few hours of Rage on a Friday and/or Saturday night, and watch it the next day. I’d categorise each song as a 1, 2 or 3. 1s I would copy onto another ... [More]
Guess what? Another bug has been found in Myki. (No, this is not an April Fool’s joke.) You know how you can load a Pass (weekly, month, yearly etc) onto your Myki, and use it, and load a second Pass which won’t activate until the first one has finished? Well there’s a bug which sometimes ... [More]
Mr Lezala also took a swipe at the State Government for failing to invest properly in signalling. “We have new signalling systems here … with no redundancy in them so when we get a thunderstorm it fails – brand new systems – because we didn’t have enough money to build redundancy in,” he told a ... [More]
I had been writing a blog post about proposed rail lines, and even went to the trouble of drawing a map of what was known about the various proposals floating around. Yesterday a very detailed PTV Network Development Plan for the rail network was released with lots of much prettier and more comprehensive maps. The ... [More]
My retro iPod
I just realised my iPod is nearly nine years old. That’s an age in the world of computers and electronics… does that make it a retro item? It’s a third-generation iPod, back from before they had silly features like apps, movie playback, and colour screens… And yes, it’s still going strong, though admittedly most of ... [More]
Pondering adding to the solar hot water on my roof with PV panels for electricity generation. My last electricity bill says I used up 659 kWh in 92 days, costing $187.61 (only including the cost for power and the 100% GreenPower surcharge; excluding the $76.41 service charge which I’d incur no matter how much power ... [More]
Parkiteer is a good programme… from my observations, more and more people are using it for secure bike parking at stations. But how many errors can you spot in this bike cage map that has been appearing in MX for the past few weeks? “Glen Waverly” spelt wrong “Glen Waverly” in the wrong spot — ... [More]