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.

Hip to be square

...and other songs by Huey Lewis and the News such as, The Power of Love. (Although I like this fan video with all the Back to to future footage better. And here is hip to be square as mentioned earlier just to be consistent.)

Speaking of Hueys. I happened to be at Borders at Doncaster tonight and Ian Hewitson owner of various pubs and restaurants (although I hear his last restaurant didn't go so well) and the long running Huey's Cooking Adventures TV show (Channel 10 at 3:30 pm weekdays IIRC) was signing his new book, Bloody Good Recipes.


It was funny because he was at his table and everyone was standing back, not sure what to do. So then he whipped open a salad (recipe in book) and offered everyone to help themselves. Can I just say it was one of the best salads I've had in my life. It was a called Thai Slaw, and it had a great Thai flavour (I reckon it is more Vietnameseish, but I'm not a chef so what would I know?) with lots of chilli and coriander. That was enough for me to buy the book. Well first I had a look to make sure the recipe was in there. Plus I got him to sign it. So in one go I got both my first cooking book and first book signed to me by the author in one go. So I guess the moral of the story is if you want me to buy your book, give me some food first.

Although next week no food will be necessary because one of my favourite authors will be signing at Borders Doncaster. That is none other than Matthew Reilly and this latest book The Five Greatest Warriors. If you are unfamiliar with his work then I would say that he rights the kinds of books that Dan Brown wishes he could write. His books are usually a mixture of myth, legend, history, science fiction, action and comedy. Matthew Reilly is known for his meticulous research, in his last book The Six Sacred Stones he even included a bibliography. The current trilogy I would say is pretty close to a melding of Indiana Jones, Stargate and Tom Clancy.

Who knew publishers made video trailers for books?

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.

Stripteach?

Yes you heard me. News today of a teacher in Hungary stripping in front of students and being caught on camera doing it. This is just creepy. I could not think of one teacher from my school that I would have liked to see strip like this, except perhaps the hot young student teacher doing work placement. At the very least this sort of thing should be after hours, extra curricular.

Also notice list of suggested viewing provided by YouTube after the clip finishes, interesting...

Direct link to video

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?

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

Bunnings Fan

Noticed these massive fans at Bunnings today. They look really lethal, but do a great job of cooling down the place.