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]
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.
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
This week’s events in Queensland are a reminder that precautions need to be taken to minimise the possibility and effects of flooding. So it’s good to see around my neck of the woods that the drains are being upgraded. These huge Lego-like pipe sections have appeared in some streets. Presumably they’re big enough to cope ... [More]
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]
I’m not going to name names, but two people remarked to me last week that the Queensland floods wouldn’t be that bad, because all the houses have stilts, so everyone up there would be fine. I wasn’t about to get into an argument about it, but at the time I had my doubts. I suspect ... [More]
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]
“Ewetube” video from Boxing Day sheep dipping. I helped out for a little while, helping to push the sheep down the chute. It might be for their own good, but they weren’t particularly keen.
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]
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]
A bit late, but some things I plan to do this year: Teach my kids chess Try to declutter the house Get Jeremy into his own bedroom Get all of us more exercise Write a computer game (even a simple one) to get more enthused again about programming Replace the TV with something shiny, flat, ... [More]