Monday 9th July After breakfast we had a walk around the beach close to our accomodation. It was windy, and pretty bleak to be honest. What we hadn’t seen the night before thanks to it being so dark was that there was a considerable amount of recent fire damage to the surrounding scrub. Apparently the ... [More]
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Current earworm: The Professionals theme
Who remembers The Professionals? I for one was hooked on this as a teenager, despite it being, as Martin Shaw described it, a one-dimensional show. It was a major inspiration for the amateur action video series “STRIKE” which I helped on in high school. It’s amusing to look back on the original Professionals title sequence ... [More]
Sunday 8th July We packed up the car and headed south along the Kwinana Freeway out of Perth. Heading towards Mandurah, my aunt gave me a pronunciation lesson: it’s not pronounced “Mandurah”, it’s pronounced “man-drah”. Eventually we left Perth’s suburbia behind us. Farmland and forest predominated, with the occasional huge billboard, including for something you ... [More]
I don’t normally see much spam thanks to the spam filters, but I did see this funny one a few days ago: IMF APPROVED PAYMENT LETTER. GOOD DAY TO YOU, It is a great pleasure to contact you this day as i have just been appointed the new Chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ... [More]
Saturday 7/7/2012 After running some errands, we were dropped at Cannington Station, which unlike some of the others we’d used, is unstaffed. A small group of smoking teenagers was hanging around the station, but they didn’t get in the way of the actual passengers. I bought tickets for the kids, and pretty soon the train ... [More]
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Footscray Fire Station: Old and new
So I thought I’d compare Perth’s SmartRider against Melbourne’s Myki card. Short term ticket options This issue is critical for tourists and other occasional users of the system, who may have no wish to buy a reusable card. Judging from the initial response to Myki’s withdrawal of short term ticket options, I suspect there’s something ... [More]
Friday 6th July Fremantle Prison We were dropped off in Fremantle at the Prison, where we’d booked for the Tunnels Tour. The Tunnels Tour, perhaps unlike more conventional prison tours, involved getting a safety briefing and an alcohol test, and then we donned gumboots, coveralls, helmets and safety harnesses and headed down a 20 metre ... [More]
Yesterday I was taking a look at the Myki Customer Experience Panel web site — that’s the set up where they ask a cross-section of Myki users about the system; get them to answer questions about what they’ve seen and how things are working for them. While some may moan about the extra cost, it’s ... [More]
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Perth trip day 1
(Scroll down to skip the words and get to the pics) Before we left I prepared by cancelling the newspaper (oddly, by phone is actually better than online; the deadlines are more relaxed), pre-purchased a Skybus ticket (you can print it yourself; very handy), and totally failed to even start packing before departure day. Thursday ... [More]
Got back from Perth last night. Had a great time, which you’ll hear about in due course, but first: something we spotted on the Skybus on the way home: Myki reader mounting points — and just like those that first appeared on trams a few years ago, they’re being used as brochure holders at the ... [More]
While I applaud Yarra Trams’ efforts to put more information on-board trams, this map threw me for a moment. I’m used to seeing east (Box Hill) on the right, and west (Port Melbourne) on the left. This had it the other way around. And before you say it: it wasn’t designed to match the actual ... [More]
Fake icicles on this tram stop, to advertise Mount Buller. I wonder if anybody except me even noticed.
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Shirts
A bit over a year ago I stopped wearing a tie to work, mostly because nobody else at work wears a tie. When you wear ties, they can be the distinguishing feature in your work attire. When the tie is gone, it’s harder to get away with, for instance, wearing white shirts every day. So ... [More]
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I finally got a Senz umbrella
I finally bought the Senz umbrella I’d been covetting (ever since I took a look at one, courtesy of blog reader Flerdle). senz was started by three Dutch industrial design students that were frustrated with traditional umbrellas. The design challenge was to design the ultimate umbrella and eliminate all of the well known umbrella struggles ... [More]
I was interested to see this post complaining about Brisbane bus services to the University of Queensland. In this Courier Mail article it appears that the most overcrowded bus services in Brisbane all serve university precincts. My dad was editor of the UQ student newspaper Semper Floreat in 1951. UQ has recently put many (possibly ... [More]