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We’ve all seen the signs on bridges and other low structures under which a roadway passes.
“Low Clearance”, “Maximum Height”, etc, etc.
In the midst of completing a work-related errand this morning in West Melbourne, I saw this sign over the garage entrance of a block of apartments.
Clearly someone with a sense of humour and who remembers the 1980’s put this sign up in honour of Matt Frewer’s semi-virtual reality character, Max Headroom.
Well played.
Loving the photo cropping fail currently currently on display on the Geelong Advertiser website:
The caption reads: “Harry Taylor at Geelong training yesterday.”
Harry must be a dentist now, because we can’t show you his face.
Melbourne’s suburban train operator Metro Trains Melbourne (MTM) has copped a lot of flack in recent days over its decision to drop sending service updates on Twitter for anything other than “major delays” – which they are defining as “20 or more minutes”.
They are telling customers to “regularly check their website” for details of other less significant delays.
Just to rub it in, they have just tweeted this:
Frankly, it seems to me that nobody at MTM has travelled on a peak hour train in Melbourne of late, or if they have, they are not paying attention to what people do during their commute.
Ask yourself how many people are staring into their Twitter feeds, updating themselves on news, sport, weather, their friends, and up until recently, how long they can be expected to be jammed inside the overcrowded train they are on.
Getting timely updates, delivered straight to the device you are already staring at, was actually useful.
But MTM want us to “periodically” check their website just in case there is a problem – (reasonably likely anyway) – because they don’t want to send out tweets, unless it’s a major delay?
What is a major delay anyway?
A five minute delay to one service can cause someone to miss a connecting train somewhere else, creating a much longer delay for the customer. If they miss an evening connection to a V/Line train, that may cost their customer a delay of an hour or more.
Such an instance really late at night might make the next available train equate to the next morning.
This is customer service is it, Metro?
“No, no, wait – we have a website you can get information from, it’s really useful!”
Genuine 1995 technology. Welcome to the past!
People want information about their service delivered to them when it matters – they don’t want to have to go find the information in case it exists.
Take a look at the Yarra Trams Twitter feed Metro – that’s how it SHOULD be done.
They used to do nothing, and you guys did an okay job. They’ve started doing it far better than you ever did, and now you don’t do it at all.
Wake up and smell the future, Metro.
We’re in it – how about you?
It really irks me that the two leading current affairs programs in Australia – Nine’s A Current Affair (ACA), and Seven’s Today Tonight (TT) – never seem to actually show any actual current affairs stories.
They generally show what often don’t seem like much more than paid advertorials.
Incidentally, these two programs finished fifth and sixth in the overall ratings for yesterday – so there are plenty of people watching their rubbish “journalism”.
Lets for instance take as an example, ACA’s fourth run of basically the exact same story:
| How Many Times Can ACA Talk About Salt Therapy? |
Same salt therapy business, same interview subjects. Over and over again – and not really a bit of hard nosed journalism in sight, right?
ACA and TT often show almost identical stories, on the same nights, as ABC’s excellent Media Watch has demonstrated.
Though still excellent, even the ABCs “7:30” has gone downhill a little since the departure of Kerry O’Brien.
The Ten Network came along in 2011 with veteran current affairs man George Negus, with a bunch of talented journalists, and we actually got a decent current affairs program on network television for a while.
Until it was cancelled, because not enough people were watching.
Because people couldn’t stop watching the drivel on Seven and Nine. They keep lapping it up.
I remember when Jana Wendt, Ray Martin, Mike Willesee and Mike Munro variously hosted ACA, and it was real journalism.
But that was long ago.
Maybe if people were actually told about the world around them, they wouldn’t be so ignorant to it. It’s not the viewers fault – they’ve just been hoodwinked into believing that ACA and TT have some journalistic merit.
It’s trash television.
I hope “7:30” doesn’t disappear, because then we’ll have almost nothing left.
I got a whiff of a really bad piece of work from Optus on Twitter this morning, in regards to the registration page for their Optus Rewards website (click image for larger view):
Really?
“Please select a title and the title should match with the gender.”
So a woman can’t be a doctor, according to Optus? Try and register on it for yourself and see.
Seriously, that’s worse than bad. That’s a dreadful look Optus.
Fail.
(UPDATE – 12:53pm): Optus have advised that they are looking into the problem, and have raised the issue with support:
“Thanks to everyone who let us know about the fault with our Optus Rewards form – we’ve logged this with Support & will keep you posted!”
Well and good.
However, I am still concerned that a form such as this was released into production in this condition. What happened to their User Acceptance Testing (UAT)? Why does ANYONE think you need to check the title against gender to go to the bother of programming such a check into the code?
Yes, fix it Optus – but improve your internal quality processes too.
(UPDATE – 8:15pm): Apparently it is fixed now.
While this is mostly likely a coding problem, rather than intentional or even unintentional sexism, as a programmer from way back, it seems strange to me that:
I’m quite sure it wasn’t intentional, but it just worries me – particularly with all the privacy leaks from telcos of late – that these organisations don’t have proper software engineering and testing practices in place.
Makes you wonder where the privacy leaks initiate.
Hacks, lazy programmers, or poor testing?
Either way, we deserve better.
We’ve just received our first power bill since the installation of our solar panels.
I think they are working.
It’s better than half of the same quarter last year, and not covering a full quarterly period.
Looking forward to the next power bill!
I certainly hope my readers have had a safe and happy holiday period. Today, I have decided to take a quick look at back at my popular posts from 2011, with the most read articles for each month, and a little discussion of each.
If 2012 throws up some similar results, it will be another good year! Enjoy!
V/Line commuters on the Geelong line, and Metro Trains commuters on the Werribee and Williamstown lines have endured another year of extensive “track equipment faults” at Newport station – and nothing ever seems to be done about it.
“Now, I’m the first to accept that unexpected things happen all the time, and that running an integrated public transport network is undoubtedly difficult, but the regularity of problems at Newport are becoming monotonous.”
The rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN) gathered pace in 2011, and at their February industry forum, the shape of end user services began appearing before our eyes.
“For the market, this means that the providers who innovate and deliver the best products over the network will emerge on top. The competition will be furious.”
Copyright holders want us to believe that we are killing their business models through online piracy, but is it us or them who are to blame?
“The sooner they adopt digital, storage-format-agnostic distribution of their content, the sooner people will stop downloading material in those formats.”
This article was actually paired with the top February article, but reared its head with a lot of page impressions in April.
“I managed to get a few moments with the hardware that end users will receive when their premises are connected to the network progressively over the next nine years.”
In the midst of another of his on-air anti-government rants, Alan Jones demonstrated for the masses how little knowledge – (or willingness to research) – he has when it comes to the NBN, and this page generated a lot of views thanks to re-tweets from the ABC’s Mark Colvin and Latika Bourke.
“If you are going to jump up and down, Alan Jones, make sure you do a bit of research first, instead of instantaneously jumping at an opportunity to forward your political agenda. Your idiocy will remain on the interwebz forever, Mr Jones.”
Back to V/Line and another attempt to “improve services” which appears to have delivered little to long suffering commuters.
“We were promised by V/Line that “these changes follow several months of work with Metro and feedback from our customers“. Oh really? Customers asked for slower trains?”
Rupert Murdoch’s various media interests – (and particularly in Britain) – have taken a hammering this year. In Australia, they’ve fought a long campaign against the government, criticising it in news reporting and editorial position at almost every turn – trying to be the news, rather than report it.
“Stop trying to make news, and actually report the news. Ironic that you are called “News Limited” – since your ability to report “news” seems rather “limited” at times.”
This was not the most highly read article on my site for the year, but it was certainly the fastest moving article – at its peak managing several hundred views an hour. Four months later, this one still stuns me!
“If your goal is to be “exemplary global citizens”, I’m sorry HP – you fail.”
The financial critics of the NBN project generally scream blue-murder about where the money to pay for it will come from. Some fairly simple second-grade mathematics is all it really takes – demonstrating some quite astonishing revenues for even a relatively weak uptake of network services.
“That’s where the money is coming from folks! And it will come a lot quicker than many would have you believe.”
October saw three-time NASCAR champion Darrell Waltrip visit Mount Panorama, for the first live broadcast of our Bathurst 1000 into the United States. Interested in what it is like inside the cars on our famous circuit, Jason Bright made sure DW will never forget his first visit!
“It was television gold, and DW seemed genuinely stunned by the experience.”
Opposition communications spokesperson, Malcolm Turnbull has been spouting for months about the “reckless” cost of the NBN – where it is starting to come to the fore that his alternative plan, though cheaper in the short term, will be far more expensive over time – a few shared by many, including the ACCC.
“Over time, the opposition plan will cost more than the current intention of building a full FTTH (better) network, before we even consider the lost benefits to the economy.”
Copyright protection is a hot topic at the moment, but information that emerged in December showed that the music industry is not suffering as much as they would have us believe – if at all.
“It isn’t downloads that are killing your industry – it is your own overpricing greed and lack of vision that’s doing it.”
Like most people, I’ve always felt that many of the adverts alongside profiles in Facebook are undoubtedly dodgy.
Take these couple of “iPhone” ads I’ve noticed this week:
The first one boldly proclaims an “iPhone 4S” for only $8.45? Even if the price was correct – (lets be honest, it sounds like crap to me) – that’s clearly not an iPhone 4S. It looks suspiciously like a first generation iPhone. Misleading ad number one.
The second ad is also touting an iPhone 4S – (this time for $51.12) – but it is clearly an iPhone 3G or 3GS displayed.
And it’s red!
Red iPhones? Misleading ad number two.
Facebook should be taking responsibility for the advertising that is shown as part of their site experience – (they’ve had enough bad publicity for various privacy screw ups throughout its existence) – so someone should be checking them out before they go live.
Seriously, these ads just seem too dodgy to me.
With just a few days left in 2011, I’ve taken a moment to have a look at the web statistics for this site, with a view to having a look at how the ongoing browser wars are travelling.
In March, I had a look at how things had been over the previous six months, and found that Google Chrome was emerging as the big winner over that period.
I was, however, curious to have a look at a bigger picture over the last four years for which I have detailed statistics – and while it has slipped a lot, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer isn’t quite dead yet.
The following table shows the annual percentage of hits on this site since 2008, that have originated from browsers identifying themselves as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari – the four main browsers in the marketplace these days:
| 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | |
| IE | 46.1% | 65.2% | 48.8% | 27.9% |
| Chrome | – | 3.2% | 9.9% | 20.1% |
| Firefox | 21.2% | 20.0% | 22.4% | 25.8% |
| Safari | 3.7% | 3.8% | 6.9% | 9.0% |
The most obvious thing to note from these numbers, is that while Internet Explorer’s market share has taken a hammering over the last couple of years – (dropping from 65.2% in 2009 to 27.9% in 2011) – it still leads the field.
On a monthly basis however, Chrome often beats IE into first place.
I feel that tends to be because of the subject matter I post month to month – in months that I post a lot of “techy” or “nerdy” stuff, Chrome tends to win – suggesting that Chrome has gotten, or is getting, a foothold amongst the geeks. I don’t think this is a surprise.
In months where I post predominantly other kinds of material, Internet Explorer does well.
Interestingly, the share of the market held by Firefox – the previous geek favourite – has remained relatively stable across the four years, and actually recorded its best year on this site in 2011. Go figure.
Perennially fourth placed Safari is still on the rise – but I suspect this is largely due to the proliferation of the Safari-equipped Apple iPad and iPhone in the community. For this reason, Safari’s share will be interesting to watch over time.
While Internet Explorer remains on top – (at least with visitors to my site) – it is clear that the massive share of the market it previously enjoyed is on the wain.
It seems the majority of people who have jumped the IE ship have landed on Chrome, but even Firefox – (which by anecdotal evidence seemed to be on the slide) – appears to have picked up some of the IE refugees, with a healthy gain in 2011.
Internet Explorer still rules – but the challengers have their foot on its throat.
Either Malaysia Airlines have introduced a new experimental wingless passenger aircraft, or Nearmap have one of those really humourous photo stitching hiccups going on at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport.
Torpedo Airlines anyone?