Sydney Transport

First we have the much disliked monorail.



I was standing in Pitt street and just made a quick grab. I dislike riding this thing very much. Reminds me of the rides at Wobbies World... I remember one day I was eating in one of the fast food places in Pitt street near where I took the video and watching a curtain of water go down the street. It was raining, but the wall of water was of course the monorail going past overhead pushing all the water off the track. I wish I'd taken a video of that. From memory it was actually raining quite heavily and the street was more or less a river of water.

Now the polar opposite, the Manly Ferry. This is by far my favourite.



I'd rate this crossing as moderate, I've had calmer, and only hope for worse one day. Perhaps not quite as bad as the in the videos that Highriser found on Youtube. As fun as the ride is I am always glad to get off though. A land lubber by nature I guess.

London City Airport

Many people may not realise that there is an airport in the heart of London. Well not quite in Piccadilly, but close by in East London, North Woolwich to be exact. It is of course London City Airport. The airport website claims it is only 22 minutes from London City by the Docklands Light Railway from Bank station. It is certainly much closer than Heathrow and Gatwick.

London City Airport caters mainly to the business market and flights go to many cities throughout North/Western Europe and Britain. Having only a 1508 metre runway generally only small regional and business aircraft are allowed in out. The one exception is Brittish Airways service to JFK (as in John F Kennedy airport in New York) using specially configured Airbus A318s. The flight reaches JFK via a stop for fuel and US Customs pre clearance in Shannon Ireland. The most common aircraft using the airport include the Fokker 50, Bombardier Dash 8 and Avro RJ/BAe 146 series.

The video above shows the spectacular approach Following the Thames over the West End, London City and Docklands. This video is a time lapse showing a typical period of 90 minutes at the airport.

Eurovison 2009

Yes it is Eurovison time again. The final is taking place on the 16th of May in Moscow as Russia won last year. The semi finals are on SBS on Friday the 15th and Saturday 16th, and the final will be broadcast on Sunday the 19th. I don't think I have ever really watched the whole thing, only flicked it on and off during the ads of another show. I probably won't watch the whole thing this year either. Better get to the reason for this post though.

Last night I was watching a video on YouTube (if you are really interested it was a video demonstrating games on the new mac mini part 3 of 3, also parts 1 and 2) that had a really catchy song over the credits. After googling the lyrics I found out that it is actually Germany's entry into this years Eurovision song contest. The song is Miss Kiss Kiss Bang by Alex swings Oscar sings. Alex is a German DJ and was a member of the 90's techno group U96, while Oscar is a "mexican broadway musical theatre performer" (quote from wikipedia entry) who lives in Munich. The song itself is like a cross between something out of the blues brothers and a Latino pop star (ie ricky martin/enrique iglasias etc). the song is mega catchy as a Eurovision song should be, usually they are bloody awful. Not that I've heard any of the other entries, but usually they are pretty awful.

In the video Oscar is the singer, while Alex is the guy in the sunglasses or behind the piano. I can't get it out of my head now and so I hope to pass it on to others.

Building Bridges Completed

I took this video on the way to work this morning. The train I was on was a bit of a groaner, a good sound effect for the video. With the realignment, all the existing single track between Westgarth and the bridge was replaced. The train I am travelling on is on the new track and bridge. Very smooth, I must say.

The fact that on both of my trips through this section today we crossed another train going in the opposite direction tells me that the nay sayers are wrong. What were/are the nay sayers saying? That this would move the problem to Clifton Hill. However, being a flat junction there will always be delays at Clifton Hill, it's a fact of life, but I think it will be better than before. No more sitting at Westgarth for 5 minutes in the morning, and Epping trains will hopefully flow more freely as a result. We shall see how it goes over the next few weeks as normal loads resume.

New Order visit Bizarro Land

About the last place you'd expect this band to perform is on a beach (I mean look how pale Gillian the keyboardist is, she's white as a sheet), let alone with The Hoff walking around in the background...

Clocking Off

It was a real pain and yet so easy to get to work today. I didn't have to worry about buying/validating tickets, and there was hardly anyone around. Thanks for the free ride Mrs Kosky that was a nice present. I felt like I was going to work on a Saturday, as the street where my workplace is was unusually quiet. The only crowds I noticed were at the fish shop, where everyone seemed to be buying prawns.

I only ended up doing about an hour and halfs worth of work, but we were told to charge a full day in our timesheets anyway, no complaints there. At 11:30 we had an informal lunch with chicken and salads, unfortunately it ran out all too quickly and many people who turned up late missed out altogether. Someone came to the rescue and ordered Pizzas.

I spent about half an hour playing a game on the computer after lunch. I was playing Portal: the flash version which is quite a good version of the full PC version of Portal. Eventually I decided enough was enough and I left work for the last time this year, but still filled in a days worth of time in my time sheet. (naughty? No we were instructed to do so. Who am I to argue?)

On the way home I finished off my Christmas shopping at Westfield Doncaster, and found it strangely relaxed. No one was really in a hurry or in much of a frenzy, it was good to see. While there I bought my last present, for my mum. I aslo bought myself a small present. Need for Speed Undercover for the Wii. I also bought 2 six packs of imitation Corona from Safeway, and four limes. The limes were unusually cheap, the ticketed price was 99 cents each, but they turned out at 50 cents each. Looking at my docket, I think the fruit shop I went to must give out random discounts. I was lucky.

From there I got the bus home and have just finished wrapping all the presents for tommorow. I think I will now go and play with the present from myself, before wrapping it up and giving it to myself again tommorow.

Festivus Drinks

I am actually amazed /ashamed I can remember so much. I only nearly vommited once....

Friday night was Christmas drinks with some of the people from work. Only six of us made it, well not everyone was invited, it's a bit of an exclusive club actually. One went early leaving 5 of us. We started upstairs at the Corner in Richmond. That was an interesting place, and for a while I thought I had violated the dress code for not wearing my cowboy hat, fairy wings or checked shirt (in any combination). There must be a tear in the fabric of space and time at this place, because pretty soon there was a line for the men's toilets, but there was none for the women's, it was really strange.

Hopping in a taxi in Swan Street we made our way to the Imperial in Spring Street, me and my mates traditional pre/post footy pub. More general drinking antics occurred. There we found people parading around a cardboard cut out of their company's CEO, I got to shake his hand. The only bad thing to happen was someone knocked a beer over onto the chips, so there were soggy beer flavoured.

At some point we left and headed down Bourke towards that fake brittish pub on the corner of Exhibition. It was full and they wouldn't let us in, or somethign like that. So instead we went to the Portland Hotel in Russel Street. It was here that I revealed to my colleagues just how bad I am at pool, even sober I'm no good, but this was just embarrassing.

On the way home I stopped off for some much needed late night nourishment at Hungry Jacks and still managed to make it to Flinders Street in time for the train, which was waiting patiently for me. I found a nice quiet seat on my own and proceded to listen my iPod. Then out of nowhere a large group of very happy, yet very drunk people descended on my oasis. AF ew of them were very rowdy, singing "Let's dance to Joy Division" by The Wombats (the rest looked rather under the weather). It was at this stage that one of the girls commented to me "you can write about this in your blog". Unless she reads my blog and recognised me from my photo on my blog, she doesn't know how correct she was. After they all got off at Westgarth, it went quiet again.

So there you go you go girl on the train, you got a mention on my blog.

Perth to Melbourne

This weekend I made a video of my flight back from Perth nearly a month ago.

Hopping Mad

So I arrive home from work tonight to find people stretching nets across the road. As it turns out there was a Kangaroo in the wilds of suburbia. The wildlife rescue lady chased it around with a tranquilliser dart on a pole for a while before it hopped into one of the nets and they were able to capture it. It was quite exciting, but you could tell the poor thing was terrified. AFter it was captured someone had to lean on it Crocodile Hunter style until the could inject the sedative. Soon enough the Kangaroo was out of it and they were able to place it in a big sack type thing for transportation.

Sandblasted

I couldn't decide which one to include so I included both. I like the comment in the second.

One of my aims in life is to visit this beach and get sandblasted, too bad if the landing is a bit short.

This is of course the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean. The airport is Princess Juliana International Airport. An interesting fact about St Martin is that the island is split in two. One side belongs to the French, they call it Saint-Martin. The other side belongs to the Netherlands, the side that has the airport, where it is called Sint Maarten. The Netherlands side is part of the Netherlands Antilles, while the French side makes up the larger part of the Collectivity of Saint Martin, which succeeded from the French Department of Guadeloupe in 2003.

If that's not interesting enough, the island has it's own bi-lingual anthem, O Sweet Saint Martin's Land, that is sung in both French and Dutch.

I don't think there is any chance that Airbus A380 aircraft will serve the island. As it is they runway is barely long enough for 747s and all aircraft need to perform a u turn at the end of the runway as there isn't enough room for a taxi way.

Edit: This video proves it is more exciting from the beach, plus shows the U Turn at the end of the runway.

The Rimmer Experience

Today I bought a 250gb external hard drive. Lately I've decided to name all my computers and drives after things and characters in red dwarf, so I decided Kryten would be a good name. My computer is called Red Dwarf and I have a flash drive called Starbug. So while looking for an icon to use for the new drive I got a little distracted in the sea of all things Red Dwarf. In fact I stumbled over something I had completely forgotten about. The Rimmer Experience, which takes place in the 7th season of the show, when Rimmer travels away from Red Dwarf as Ace Rimmer (fellows, smoke me a kipper I'll be back for breakfast.). I'm much more familiar with the first 4 seasons, anything after that I've only seen once or twice.

The Rimmer Experience

I would embed the video, but BBC Worldwide has disabled the embedding feature. There are others but this is the fullest version I could find).

Links:

• The Official Red Dwarf Website
• Red Dwarf - Wikipedia
• List of Red Dwarf Episodes - Wikipedia
• Red Dwarf sound bytes

Now if you don't mind, I've got some skutters to attend to....

If you've got this far you've done well. if you liked the Rimmer experience you'll love tongue tied. I have a vague recollection that I made a post about tongue tied some time in the past, but it was before I started tagging posts so it's a bit hard to find right now. Go look it up on You Tube.

And after all that I still haven't found a decent Kryten icon to use...

Pop Songs

By pop songs I mean songs that pop into your head for no apparent reason. This happened to me the other week at work. A colleague a few desks away on the other side of the partition has a clock radio that I can sometimes hear. For one instant I thought I heard a song I haven't heard for years, but I soon realised it was actually a different newer song. in that instant I was gone and I had that older song stuck in my head. I couldn't recall the name, or the band, I only had some of the tune and a line of the lyrics.

"they could see the road that they walked on was paved in gold"

So I typed the lyrics into Google, and sure enough I discovered other people wanted to know the same thing. It turned out that the song is called "The Way" by a band called Fastball. I finally got around to finding it on YouTube. It's funny because I've heard the newer different song a few times since and it still makes me think of "The Way" even though it actually sounds nothing like it.

I still have no idea what the newer song is or who sings it, all I know is that Mix play at least twice each workday between 9 AM and 5 PM...

Geo-Tube

I was mucking around with google maps and found out that you can embed YouTube videos in the info boxes, so I put in some place marks for all three of my videos and embedded the videos in the info boxes, simple. This is the result.

View Larger Map

Unfortunately the embedded map is a little small to view the videos, but the full size map accessed via the links is a bit better. I'll have to see if I can get a smaller video size by editing the embed url of the video.

It has got me thinking that I should start carrying around my GPS more often so I can try some geotagging.

My GPS is not one of the fancy new sat nav thingos though, it's a Garmin GPS 12, a model which is about 15 years old and very heavy due to the 4 AA batteris it takes. I got it for my 21st birthday way back before GPS went mainstraem. It has no maps built in, it just stores waypoints and track logs. I mostly use it for Geocaching, something I should blog about in it's own right.

Geotagging is just adding a set of geographical coordinates to the metadata of a photo so it can be located on a map. Flickr allows you to geotag your photos as well. I also believe there is a way to add coordinates to the EXIF data stored in the JPEG file, but I don't know anything about that. Although this is pretty much in my line of work, it is something I've never really investigated.

More Human Tetris

This one is different to the last though. It uses stop go animation and is more faithful to the video game. The sound effects and music are great.



Also in the series are Space Invaders, Pong and Poll Position.

Human Tetris

AKA Brain Wall. Someone was telling me about this a few weeks ago.



Apparently Channel 9 has the rights to a version of this show called Hole in the Wall coming to our screens soon.

You Tube - Tourism

Lately I think I've nearly been watching more You Tube videos than TV. Today I happened across quite a few interesting short films. One film of these that I watched was Misguided Tour.



Misguided Tour led me on to some legitimate tourism ads for Melbourne, such as, Run Rabbit Run for the Yarra Valley, the ball of string one, and what passed for a tourism ad in 1985. The last one shows just how far we have come in the last 20 odd years, replacing sport (it's nearly all sport) and nubile young young women with more abstract concepts of what Melbourne has to offer the potential tourist. Was greyhound racing at Olympic Park really a tourist attraction in 1985?

Then again who knows what people will think of the ball of string in 20 years time?

Greener pastures

I know how boring, another computer post. I promise this is the last computer post I will make for a long time (unless something goes horribly wrong).

I have given up on the 8800 GT dream, I have since found out that there are ways to make it work, but I can't be bothered any more. So today I went and bought a cheap little 256 MB nvidia 8400 GS from ASUS for $52 (in case you were wondering that's a photo of it at the top of this post). Maybe I am easily pleased, but I'm impressed with it. I tried it out on MSTS, and I can now run it at full detail levels for the first time ever. I tried out Far Cry too, which runs pretty well at moderate resolution and detail. It certainly beats the integrated graphics I've been used to until now.

As you can see by the games I've tested so far I'm not much of a gamer, which is why I think this card will do fine. One other game I am interested in is the oddly named (yet totally obvious when you see it on the shelf in the shop) The Orange Box, which is really a compilation of games. I have heard good things about it, and know a few people who have it, so I want to play too. This card will run it fine.

I would never have thought such a cheap video card could perform so well if it weren't for the videos I found on You Tube. Most of the videos were of people playing games supposedly running on this card, I believed them, and I think it paid off. I have come to realise that You Tube could be a big help in purchasing decisions from now on. Of course some of the videos were a bit painful to sit through, but I usually go to another when boredom starts to kick in. I'm starting to really like You Tube actually

Filmage

Over the Christmas/New Year period I've been to see two films, the first was The Darjeeling Limited, and the second was Death at a Funeral. I highly recommend both.

The Darjeeling Limited (Trailer on YouTube) was great, although the beginning was confusing, but that was explained after snooping around on imdb for a while. It is about the reuniting of three estranged brothers on a train in India after not seeing each other since the death of their father a year earlier. Directed by Wes Anderson, to me it seemed less off the wall than his previous film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I really liked it. One particular scene made me cry, not because it was sad, it was, but it was just really beuatiful, not many films do that to me. I should also mention the great soundtrack mainly consisting of famous Bollywood music along with some Kinks ,Rolling Stones and classical.

Death at a Funeral I also really liked. It is nothing but a classic British farce. Just go along for the ride, and do be prepared for some toilet humour. I can honestly say this is the first film I've been to where the whole (almost full) theatre has been in uncontrollable fits of laughter. Go see it.

Festivus for the rest of us

George (Jason Alexander) and Frank (Jerry Stiller) Costanza at their best.

What is Festivus?

Now with Video

A couple of posts back I uploaded a rather crude video taken with my phone. That gave me some inspiration to upload some bits and pieces to YouTube.

So far I've just uploaded a few short clips of trains and trams. Expect more over the next few days as I go through my collection of videos I've shot with my digital camera. nothing fantastic, go take a look:

http://au.youtube.com/user/ben7k