Imagine if a political party were to decide that it is going to cost too much to upgrade the roads to allow for all the cars and trucks that will need to use them over the next few years. Instead they propose getting rid of all the cars and trucks and making everyone use a horse and cart instead. Then imagine that a stupid miscalculation means that there will be no budget for providing the carts and so everyone is going to have to scrap their cars and trucks and if they are really lucky they’ll get a horse to replace it with.

Can you imagine a political party proposing a policy like that for transport? Well one of the parties in Australia is running with an equivalent policy for communications in today’s election. If they win then Australia will be thrown back into the stone age in so far as communications is concerned.

One of the problems with abbreviations such as this is that they can mean different things to different people. What this particular abbreviation means depends on the age of the person receiving it. To older people this is the abbreviation for “Lots Of Love” while for younger people it means “Laugh Out Loud”. So now you can give love to old people and laugh at young people at the same time just by saying LOL.

I spent a couple of hours last Sunday at the first rally protesting against this totally stupid idea of setting up a major freight terminal in the middle of a residential area. Prior to the speakers actually taking to the stage to have their say I spent about half an hour talking with the labour candidate for tomorrows election while a photographer from one of the local papers took lots of pictures (none of which made it into the paper as the editor preferred one showing a part of the crowd with someone holding up a poster supporting the Liberal party in the foreground). The plan for the intermodal was actually developed initially by the Liberal partyin 2004 and the Labour party only inherited it and continued with it when they took over in 2007. So both parties are actually in favour of this stupidity. Both local candidates are opposed and have promised to fight against their party view on this issue. So this issue doesn’t appear to offer any opportunity to choose between the parties.

The one area where the two parties seem to differ the most in their policies is with regard to their broadband plans. The current technology is stretched to the limit with little room for any way of providing any faster internet access. Current connection speeds on the fastest plans can be anything up to 24Mbp while around 5-6 Mbp is more typical for most people located further from the exchange. The only practical way of providing faster speeds is by getting rid of the copper lines and replacing them with something that can handle much higher speeds. The obvious choice is fibre optic which is easily capable of 1000Mbp+. The Labour party have already started rolling out this solution in Tasmania (where the first rollouts came in 10% under the budgeted cost). Their proposal is to cover 93% of the population with fibre optic and using wireless and satellite at 24Mbp to cover the other 7%. The Liberals are proposing to save money by not implementing the fibre optic solution but instead supplementing the existing system with additional wireless. They claim that this will be a cheaper solution but their calculations have neglected to take into account that in order to give everyone access to wireless at 24Mbps they will need towers on every street connected together by fibre optic as if they only put a tower in every second street the radio frequencies they’ll need will mean they will have to shut down all the TV and radio stations so as to use the entire radio spectrum for this new purpose. Even then the cost of the fibre optic plus topwers will really work out far more expensive than the Labour solution to provide a system less than 1/50th the speed. If that policy were the only point of difference between the two parties then Labour would deserve to get 1000% of the votes at least since a 21st Century solution is far better than an 18th Century one .

Of course that isn’t the only consideration. Another difference also connected with the internet is with respect to filtering of sites. The Labour party wants the ISPs to implement a filter to block certain sites. Unfortunately there are a couple of things wrong with this. The blocked sites once thwey realise they are blocked can set up proxies to allow access past the filter. Once a proxy gets blocked they can add another and so on. So the sites the filter is intended to block will not be blocked for any length of time. Instead the sites ending up getting blocked will be any that are accidentally included on the list and which are not supposed to be blocked to start with. Also once you have censorship like this in place it is a far more minor step to extend it to block (or attempt to block) other things. This filtering will slow down everyone’s internet access and have very little effect apart from that. The filtering on your home computer to protect your children from harmful sites will be as necessary with the ISP filter in place as it is now but it will be less effective because of the blocked sites setting up proxies that will mean that the worst of the porn will no longer be able to be blocked at home because the proxy to get it past the ISP filter will also get it past the filter on your computer. By implementing this the Labour party will be reducing the protection that their proposal is supposed to be increasing. The Liberal party plan of assisting people to implement home filtering (as they did before the 2007 election) is the much better alternative to resolve this issue as at least it will help rather than hinder..

I first started watching this show when it first came out. Unfortunately, after I had seen the first five episodes I moved half way around the world and never saw or heard anything more of the show until recently. I say unfortunately because I thought that the five episodes that I was back in 1975 were all excellent.

I have now had the opportunity to rewatch those first five episodes along with the following twenty one episodes that made up the first two of the three seasons of the show. I still think that the first five episodes that I had seen before are excellent. The following eight episodes that make up the rest of season one are not quite as good and so I suppose that I am lucky that so many years passed between when I first saw those first five episodes and seeing the rest of the season as if I has seen them all together I would have lowered my opinion of the entire show.

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I have just finished reading the eleventh and twelfth books in this series. The eleventh was the last that Robert wrote before he died and the twelfth was the first of the three that the last book has now been divided into by the person who has been asked to finish it off. One thing I can say is that the choice of author to take over is excellent as I couldn’t really tell what if any parts of the book had been written by Robert before he died – it all fitted perfectly into the series. It is also nice that at least some of the issues raised in earlier books are finally starting to be resolved.

After playing around a bit more I finally makaged to get the AUSkey software to download – had to use Opera identifying itself as Firefox since the downlload refused to run in Firefox at all because it said the browser isn’t supported (that’s what happens when you use browser detect code that was obsolete before the galaxy started to form). Next problem was in actually trying to install AUSkey. Couldn’t do it on Opera even though it didn’t detect that the browser wasn’t compatible – just had it crash when it tried to do something Opera doesn’t support (that’s what happens when you don’t test for the features you are trying to use actually being supported by the browser before you use them). Firefiox initially wouldn’t allow the install to even start since it said the browser wasn’t supported. It wasn’t until I updated the useragent so that Firefox identified itself as Internet Explorer that the install would run.

The current status is that the ATO credentials work to get me into my account in both Firefox and Opera (identified as Firefox) while the AUSkey only works in Firefox (identified as IE). I haven’t yet tested if it will work in Opera when it identifies itself as IE so maybe that’s the solution to getting AUSkey to work properly. Just wish that the ATO would consider updating their software so that it at least uses prehistoric code suitable for use by the dinosaurs instead of the current code that has been obsolete for 15 billion years.

It used to be possible to get petrol slightly cheaper from Woolworths petrol stations by using a 4 cent discount card. You’d be credited with one fuel purchase at that discount every time you spent more than a certain amount in the supermarket. NOT ANY MORE.

You never used to get the full 4 cent saving because there are always other service stations around offering petrol one or two cents cheaper than Woolworths (lets disregard the E10 fuel since it gives you 10% less kilometres per litre and so you have to add 11% to the price to give a proper price comparison making the standard unleaded the cheaper option).

Before the recent Woolworths change the comparison was quite simple. To buy say 30 litres of fuel elsewhere at say 121.9 would cost $36.57 while to buy from Woolworths at 122.9 less the 4 cent discount would cost $35.67, a 90 cent saving. When the Woolworths petrol station on my direct route stopped offering standard unleaded last year I started going 1/2 kilometre out of my way to visit another Woolworths petrol station.(reducing the saving to 83 cents).

Woolworths have now decided to stop accepting credit card payments at all. Now given that the bank charges me $1.00 more for direct debit transactions to what it does for credit card transactions I never use direct debit since credit card is always cheaper for anything under $100 (even where the supplier passes on the 1% Visa transaction fee). In fact it is so long since I did make a direct debit purchase using the card that I have forgotten the PIN needed to do so (and since I rarely make purchases over $100 have no reason for getting it reset).

So Woolworths having dropped accepting credit card payments completely means I can no longer buy fuel there at all. I wouldn’t want to anyway since even with their 4 cent discount their fuel now works out to be 13 cents dearer for 30 litres than it can be bought elsewhere at the standard price (without my having to go out of my way to get it). Even if all the other service stations start passing on the fee for using a credit card it still works out only 23.8 cents dearer to buy my30 litres petrol from somewhere that accepts Visa than it does to buy it from Woolworths with their 4 cent discount. Of course that’s assuming that other places are only one cent per litre cheaper than Woolworths. Often there are some that are two cents cheaper and then even with paying the fee for using a credit card the other petrol station would then be 6.2 cents cheaper than Woolworths wsith their 4 cent discount.

Conclusion – with dropping support for credit card while still keeping their petrol prices higher than elsewhere Woolworths have removed any reason for using their petrol stations. Note also that these calculations do not take into account the additional bank charges on the Woolworths grocery purchases that get you the 4 cent discount in the first place and once that is taken into account the 4 cent fuel discount is more than negated by the extra bank charges on buying from Woolworths in the first place unless theiy actually do reduce all their prices by 1% and since they haven’t reduced their petrol price at all it is unlikely that there will be any reduction in the price of groceries either. Best off to stay away from Woolworths completely.

The Australian Government has rolled out a new security key system to work across all Government web sites in place of the old site by site security keys. The only problem is it doesn’t work. Instead of making it easier to log in it locks you out completely

Firstly the instructions in the email sent advising how to swap over are wrong as they tell you to use the login option to start the change whereas it then tells you that you don’t have the software installed. You then need to use the register option instead which then recognises that you do have the old security installed and when you select to then upgrade from that tells you that the security you have been using for years isn’t supported by your browser/operating system.

Trying to sign up from scratch is even worse because you enter page after page of confidential information which the system discards as it goes so that by the time you get to the confirm page at the end you are asked to confirm that all the fields were blank.

Typical Government releasing things they forgot to test. What’s even worse is that they have broken things so I can no longer log in at all.

Just after 6am this morning as I was driving up Henry lawson Drive I passed a truck that was on fire. The truck had two trailers on it with the one nearest the cab well alight with flames and smoke going into the air above the truck by at least the height of the truck. Neither the cab nor the second trailer were burning but the heat from the fire was very noticable as I drove past.

Two other vehicles had parked some way up the road from the fire. Presumably they had stopped to help and had parked as close as was reasonable given the heat of the fire. I passed a fire truck goung toward the fire a minute or so later so the fire can’t have started much before I saw it. There was mention of the fire on the radio a few minutes after that but they knew less about it than I already did. Guess I’ll have to wait for the news to find out how it happened.

After ten years this particular reality tv show is well past its use by date. I gave up watching it regularly after the third of the twenty seasons that have now been shown and have just looked in on the show occassionally in order to see if they have made any changes to actually make the show interesting again. These last two seasons have perhaps been slightly more interesting than most (and I have therefore looked at the show more often) simply because they have had one of the dumbest contestants on the show since season one where no one knoew how it worked. So called ‘evil’ Russell didn’t have a clue how to play the game and concentrated so hard on making sure that he made it through the entire 39 days that he gave no thought whatever to the far more important part of the game – making sure that the people on the jury will vote for you rather than someone else in the final vote. It would make absolutely no sense for the organisers to include him in the game ever again since it is obvious that everyone else playing will just take him to the final knowing that no one will vote for him. It only worked the second time because none of the other competitors in season 20 had seen season 19 before they played against him and therefore were unaware until it was too late that he plays to make it to the end rather than playing to win. While not the dumbest person to play the game ever, almost all the other players in season 20 knew more about playing the game than he did and it was only because of the stupid way that he was playing that led others to make the stupid mistakes that they made because they were under the mistaken impression that he was playing to win.