Fighting Ninja Turtles

Yesterday morning I had to take a taxi from Flinders St to Camberwell because I had missed the last peak hour express to Riversdale. All other trains were running express to Blackburn and I couldn’t wait 20 minutes.

The ride to Camberwell on citylink was quick but all that time gained was lost once we hit Burke Rd.

Later on after work and after work drinks I got to back to Flinders St at 10pm. Not really wanting to have to take a late train home, I decided to take a taxi from Flinders St. The young driver stated that he knew the destination because he lived in the area (despite looking up his Melways), I didn’t mind the loud music, the air conditioning, the talking on the phone whilst driving.

Once we hit Mt Alexander road I knew there was going to be problems, I asked for him to turn at the Brunswick St intersection so we can beat the Puckle St traffic, missed it, asked for him to turn into any other the other side streets missed them as well. Finally we arrived a Puckle St and I was surprised that he was going to hang a right hand turn from a left only lane. Nope he continued straight.

We got to Queens Park / Buckley St where he stopped outside a house to talk to an old lady and two young people; presumably relatives. The conversation was short and we were on our way. This time the driver knew all the back streets. Of cause the fare was higher than usual. I wasn’t going to debate the matter with the driver, paid the inflated fare on my credit card, asked for a recipt and went inside.

Are taxi drivers allowed to do this? Stop and talk to people after ‘accidentally’ missing a street, or three or four streets, then going half way across a suburb? I guess so.

Flu season is definitely upon us. I’ve got it, 3 other people at work have got it and about a third of the university has it as well.

In the case of the university the fact that the air con is perpetually at a bone chilling 20 degrees doesn’t help either.

On the subject of university, I’m totally over education right now. This semester sucks more than anything mainly because two of my units overlap which equals a higher chance of failure. I also have to work on one of the days that I have classes which is OK since I don’t have any classwork just three big exams.

I’ve also been looking at options for changing back to Deakin so I can get a degree in Multimedia Technology instead of Information Systems at my current uni.

On top of that my new employer wants me to ramp up to full time. I’m very resistant to that idea since I would like to have at least one day a week off.

Today is 13th Friday of the 4th month of the 7th year of the of the 2nd millennium and what a crazy day it’s been.

Firstly, the bus arrived at the scheduled time which meant that I was able to make every other connection. That particular run is looked after by the company owners’ son who is the equivalent to Young Mr Grace*. He always asks if the drivers are doing a good job, keeping to schedule and the like.

Get into work, on my 3rd day and world war three broke out. I was taken off my project to help finish another one off. I spend the whole day normalising a database containing 187,000 records then moving the the records to various servers for testing. Because of size limitations, I could only move 40,000 records at a time. A real snooze job.

Lunch was no better. Almost everything on Burke Road is twice the price than Puckle St and Burnt. For lunch I had a burnt sausage roll, burnt croissant and hot chocolate - and for lack of a better word, the milk was burnt.

Got off work at 6:45 PM to try and fly into the city to meet up with my best mate.

On the way to Camberwell station there were two kids chroming in the bushes. There was another little shit keeping watch. I went up to the booking office and notified the attended who gave me a ‘not again’ look. 30 seconds later there was a ‘Oi, you little bastards’ and the sound of running.

Met up with best mate at 7:20 PM to go to a bar based on an SMS of dubious origin. After Beam and Cola and Stella I needed to get home lest mommy dearest do her bit. Leave best mate at Elizabeth St, need Macca’s, get call from other mate saying he got the SMS as well but was going to Marquee Club instead. Get SMS from best mate telling me to hurry up because Broardy train is leaving in two minutes.

Best mate gives me a lift home cause he’s a good guy. Hope he doesn’t do burnout outside house. Then again his car struggles to get to 70.

Get home, sort through e-mails, lick wounds, have a shower and write this. Time to get to bed.

*Are you being served reference.

Oh what a circus. The media had a field day during January and February over the Siemens braking issues that forced the temporary withdrawal of trains and services.

Expert Paul Mees came out from under his bridge making counter-productive statements, PTUA started to sell their 20 second soundbytes CD on late night television and finally an article written by Stephen Moynihan made it to the front page of The Age (despite being riddled with spelling and technical errors).

However, without a doubt the best tabloid journalism would have to be attributed to Seven News, who in an exclusive rang Siemens in the UK asking if braking equipment from Connex had been sent up that way for testing. The lowly receptionist replied ‘not that I’m aware’. Somehow Seven News had uncovered some devious scheme on the part of Siemens and Connex.

But after all the dust settled and the papers returned to reporting real news, Paul Mees returned to his bridge did commuters really care? Was the frustration built up by commuters just exacerbated by the papers and TV news reports? It wasn’t like commuters upon seeing a Siemens train arriving at a platform jumped for cover just in case it over shot the platform and blew up. It was a clear case of media beatup and we all got sucked in.

But allow me to digress to my next point of order: Lyn Koskey. Not doing many favours for herself in the PR department. Now her predecessor was a fool, everyone knows it. However he was a fool who knew a bit about PR and his portfolio. Koskey on the other hand doesn’t appear to; especially since her last few gaffs.

Unfortunately, the PTUA is a limp dog and Paul Mees talks too much crap. Bracks seems to think she’s doing a good job. For her sake, lets hope she’ll be up to the task. Otherwise the fool and the joker can take the portfolio back.

On the last episode of Testing the view…

Beta 2 came out and people were unsatisfied with its performance. Now out in the world RC1, the final version is out for the entire world to see…

So I decided to treat myself and purchase a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium Upgrade. The old desktop Mac is starting to show its age and it’s going to be progressively phased out so I need a semi-decent windows box for day to day stuff. As a side note, my desktop PC is a P4 3ghz with 1GB ram 128MB Graphics card, DVD writer. Not too shabby but it will be an uphill battle to see if I can get Aero graphics working.

Vista comes in this hard plastic case that has a section where the disc slides out. Microsoft seem to be slowly learning that less is more in terms of style and function.

The installation process didn’t take that long. I decided to do a totally clean install and format. The process took just under half an hour.

Once vista booted up for the first time you have to create a user account. After that the system goes into this optimisation process, seems like the hard drive is going through a defragmenation.

The UI for vista is very familiar. Not that much has changed except most functions are now centralised inside the windows ‘orb’, formally the start menu. There is easy access to system functions, user folders and applications. I was able to get Aero working as well but due to the low specs of my graphics card things went a little slowly. Turning Aero off gave a massive performance boost.

Drivers were not an issue. Normally I have a stack of driver discs lined up ready for the various components. Vista automatically detected my graphics card, network card and sound card. It would be interesting to know what proportion of the DVD install disc is allocated to drivers.

Bundled applications are OK. The DVD, Movie Editor and Photo gallery can’t really compete with Apple’s iLife range. Windows Media Player is a different story. I’ve been using iTunes since version 1.0 during that time Apple have only made marginal enhancements. WMP 11 is a total redesign and it looks awesome. It’s feature packed and well integrated into Vista. Same with Media Centre. UI wise I prefer the older version of Media Centre but the fact that Vista was able to detect my xBox 360 and then send Media Centre to the xBox and treat the xBox as a Media Centre extender gets extra marks in my books.

There is so much more I could go on about. They are the main bits that I’ve taken from my first few hours of using Vista. I suppose it is not a total rip off of Mac OS X but rather sets some standards that the new version 10.5 should try to aspire to.

Jury is out at the moment might come back with a followup in a few weeks time.