Author Archives: Michael Wyres

Can Woolworths Really Do This?

On a recent trip to the supermarket, I spotted this interesting piece of advertising: I don’t know about you, but if I was CSR I would be pretty annoyed that my product had been singled out and jammed into the faces of customers as being the “bad choice” against the in-house brand. Doesn’t seem quite […]

Stop The Floods – Of Political Bullshit

We all agree the recent spate of flooding up and down Australia’s eastern seaboard of epic – and some say biblical – proportions has been a terrible disaster. The final damage bill will probably be never accurately known, but will undoubtedly also be of epic or biblical proportions. It will certainly be massive. There has […]

Single Point of Failure

Well, yet again this morning, thousands of commuters from the western suburbs of Melbourne and Geelong had their daily travel severely disrupted, after a power failure at Newport station disabled signals and points. Now, I’m the first to accept that unexpected things happen all the time, and that running an integrated public transport network is […]

SPF Fail – One for the SysAdmin Nerds

In one for the nerdy mail system administrators out there, I spotted a rather uncommon SPF result in my SMTP logs this morning. If you know your SPF, you’ll know that no matter what IP address a piece of email comes from, with these records, the email will ALWAYS pass an SPF lookup. Clearly an […]

Packaging Fail

Spotted this one in Woolworths while doing a spot of last minute New Year’s Eve shopping: What exactly is a “wood buring oven”?

Happy New Technology!

Here is some modern technology explained, complete with laugh functionality for your enjoyment on New Years Eve! Happy New Year to everyone – see you on the other side…(tomorrow)…

The Richie Benaud Score

We don’t get to see it very often, but today we saw the score which makes the hair on Richie Benaud’s neck stand up: Tyoo for tyoo tyoo tyoo. Marvellous.

Jimeoin On What?

Scanning the Foxtel EPG this evening, I came across this rather ambiguously named program starring comedian Jimeoin: I’m hoping they mean “ice” – as in frozen water – and not something else! Funny!

NBN Solving the Employment Crisis

In yet another thoroughly weak attempt to broadside the NBN, The Australian newspaper has come up with this latest piece of drivel: NBN Battery Recycling Could Add $240m Even if it does add that much to the total cost of the NBN – (and I’m in no position to judge how the recycling industry operates) […]

NBN Allows for Expansion of Mobile Services

Through the National Broadband Network (NBN) business plan, released yesterday and available here, it becomes apparent that the NBN will allow for third party mobile service providers to use the network to expand their coverage. Specifically, on page 48 of the plan, under “Backhaul Service to Mobile Base Station”, it states: “The Plan assumes that […]