Dream the other day: Dreamt we were thinking about converting the (small) spare room into a bedroom, and someone pointed out the house has a whole upstairs section that for some reason none of us had never noticed. We went up and found three more bedrooms (one tiny, with very narrow bunk beds) and a ... [More]
Many people like to whinge about the price of fuel, but Steve Fielding’s idea of cutting fuel taxes is a very bad idea — it would inevitably lead to more usage, and cutting prices is the last way you want to try and fight oil shortages. This opinion piece for ABC Online goes into more ... [More]
The van we hired on the weekend was to move my Dad to a new place. As he is getting older, he needed an upgrade. He’s very well read, and it turned out he had way more books than I expected. So a lot of the time (and load) was spent shifting heavy boxes and ... [More]
On Saturday my bro-in-law Adrian and I were headed up to Coburg in a hired van. We were just getting onto the Bolte Bridge when Adrian noticed a warning light on the dashboard. We weren’t sure what it meant, so I reached for the van owner’s manual, which said something along the lines of: 1. ... [More]
If you thought $494 million was a lot to pay for the new “Myki” smartcard public transport ticketing system, hold onto your hats… today it was revealed the actual cost is more than double that — $1 billion dollars, no less. Somehow the government are now claiming they needed to add the operating costs, which ... [More]
Stupidest commercial of the moment: that Fisher and Paykel washing machine advert with the woman continually bending down/standing up to empty washing out of a frontloading machine, and bemoaning “Surely there must be an easier way?” Pah, some adverts just make me want to throw a brick at the TV, and shout at the screen. ... [More]
At The Prince Of Wales, St Kilda, Wednesday night. Emily Ulman was okay. Support to the support. Polite clapping. Justine bemoaned that she rarely gets out to see live music, but twice recently she’d got Emily. It’s like rarely flying, then taking an overseas trip and getting the same movie twice. No matter how good ... [More]
1. It was what I needed. I’ve been surviving on a (slightly rickety) old mono laser printer for some time now. I decided to upgrade to a colour copier/scanner/printer, to get back colour printing, to clear out the aging scanner that is only just compatible with Windows XP, and to avoid having to go to ... [More]
(With apologies to Bargearse.)
I pay $73 per year to the RACV because I want someone to get me out of a scrape when I’ve locked myself out of my car or the battery is dead or whatever. It somewhat disturbs me that what’s left over from that $73 goes into lobbying for more, bigger, faster roads. I saw ... [More]
Given there are magazines for just about every topic under the sun, I suppose you can tell a lot about a person’s interests from which ones they buy. A lot of those that I buy (or subscribe to) are pretty geeky. But I don’t normally buy railway-related magazines. Many of them I find overly-gunzelly, which ... [More]
Jeremy is rather unimpressed with the postal service. On Monday last week he mailed a letter to himself from my mum’s place, and it took until today to arrive. Some other mail had been turning up — sporadically, but something every few days. I wonder if some of the posties on post-Christmas holidays? For a ... [More]
Josh sent me a nifty device for measuring the power consumption of various devices. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time: to see what drains power, and how much, and to see in particular what even drains power when it’s idle. So I spent a couple of hours plugging it into ... [More]
At some stage last year I reached the point where I’d been separated/divorced for as long as I was married. I’m happy to say it’s a path that most of my contemporaries don’t seem to have followed me down. Indeed, of those who have got married and had kids, I can only think of one ... [More]
I’m alone in the house, blasting Billy Bragg on the stereo while cleaning up. Part of preparation for the concert on January 30th. Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards… my God I love that song. Does it speak to everybody in community activism like this? For those who haven’t seen it (I hadn’t), here’s the ... [More]
Spotted in Victory Park, Patterson Road, Bentleigh yesterday. (It’s where we go when the car is getting its tyres looked at.) I’ve seen a few obscure pieces of playground equipment in my time, but what is this? I can’t figure it out. It’s too high to reach, even for an adult. I wondered if it ... [More]