Categories
Melbourne PTUA transport

Today’s funeral

If you didn’t see it on the news, here are some images from today’s funeral of a tram stop.

Categories
Food'n'drink

Cafe Armenia

Cafe Armenia. I’ve lived in and around Carnegie for upwards of ten years, and for much of that time I’ve joked about eating at the Cafe Armenia. Well on Friday we finally did it. I had no idea what to expect — there’s only so much you can glean from cowardly peering at the menu  ... [More]

Categories
PTUA transport

Funeral for a tram stop

Following the decision to close tram stops in Collins St, Flinders St and Victoria Pde, and expectations that more will follow, there will be a funeral for tram stop 7 at Russell and Collins Streets on Monday: R.I.P. Tram Stop 7, Route 109 1886-2005 Public Funeral 12.30pm, Monday 23rd May 2005 Cnr Collins St &  ... [More]

Categories
Geek / tech Melbourne

How accurate are weather forecasts?

The Bureau of Meteorology installed a multi-gazillion dollar supercomputer a year or two back, with the aim of improving the accuracy of weather forecasts. How accurate are they? Well over about a week, I compared forecasts (including up to a week ahead of the day) against the actual weather reported the next day. I was  ... [More]

Categories
Melbourne Photos

Foggy highway

(Farnsworth Avenue, Footscray, last Sunday morning)

Categories
transport

Thirteen

Coming into Flinders Street… “Train arriving platform 13, this train is not taking passengers.” The guy standing in the doorway pipes up. “I hate platform 13.” “Why, ‘cos it’s deep underground in the middle of nowhere?” “No” he shuddered, “I just don’t like the number 13.”

Categories
Melbourne

Tipping and the draft

I’m at home today, having a day off to get some errands done. Like picking up my new computer. And tidying the desk so it can be set up. Only 4 in the tipping over the weekend. Perhaps my problem is that my tipping method (with which I won one competition, and came equal first  ... [More]

Categories
Film

Bad Santa… worse film

Bad Santa. I seem to recall this got reasonable reviews last year. Maybe it was the Christmas spirit that skewed critics’ judgements. I like poking fun at tradition as much as anybody, but I found it dull (and Marita fell asleep — nuff said?). The Joke got a few laughs early on, but wore thin  ... [More]

Categories
Home life

Happy birthday Isaac

Isaac turned 10 today. Ten. The big one-zero. It’s hard to express how I feel, how happy I am that he (and his brother) have turned out to be so happy, healthy, smart and considerate. The time since he was born has flown by, really — it seems so recently that he was just a  ... [More]

Categories
Geek / tech

Vital statistics

Computers I have bought – 1995 vs 2000 vs 2005 (the one I bought yesterday).   May 1995 June 2000 May 2005 Processor 60 Mhz 650 Mhz11 times faster than 1995 3 Ghz5 times faster then 200050 times faster than 1995(Actually it’s not really valid to compare raw clock speeds) Memory 8 Mb 256 Mb32  ... [More]

Categories
Film

Quick review: Huckabees

I ♥ Huckabees: Quite funny, strange plot. The concept of the existential detectives reminded me Dirk Gently, but I haven’t read it in about a decade, and don’t really recall how similar it is. Very enjoyable.

Categories
Film transport

The truth about Connex

This picture taken inside Flinders Street Station yesterday reveals what we train users should have guessed all along… That Connex is aligned with the Dark Side.

Categories
Consumerism Home life

Winter

I might be losing weight since the weather got cold, what with freezing my arse off every morning. Welcome to winter. Since my evil scheme to get us out of this cold house by the onset of winter hasn’t come off, yesterday I went and bought an extra heater, to prevent the family freezing to  ... [More]

Categories
Melbourne

Conversations overheard

A bunch of Year 12 boys from my old school on the train yesterday morning, jabbering away loudly like teenage boys do. “Yeah I got all sorts of weird shit with the co-efficients. Did you put c squared over x?” Then more talk of mathematical terms I couldn’t fathom. Ah, not the usual talk of  ... [More]

Categories
Film

Don’t panic

I was watching something on TV early on Saturday night when an advert for Grease — The Musical came on. And I pondered to myself that Grease was a fine idea for a movie, but really, was there the need to ram it into the ground by endless adaptions into other formats, such as musicals?  ... [More]

Categories
Geek / tech Net

Turn on your feeds

Dear Blogger users, I’m increasingly reading blogs through an aggregator. This is a software tool that grabs text from lots of different web pages and puts it in one place for me. It saves me time, and allows me to read more blogs in less time. More people are using them all the time. To  ... [More]