jeremy.id.au

The antics of ticket inspectors has once again shown up in the media (see The Age which even has video footage), this week. While, if you choose to travel without a valid ticket you should expect to get some sort of fine, I’ve long been unimpressed with the way that the State Government and operators handle this aspect of the public transport system.

Well you consider factors such as the relatively small offence involved, yet the unproportionally high fine to be occured (much higher than parking fines), it’s no wonder that these matters escalate out of hand. Before too long we have a passenger being pinned down to the ground for not paying a $1.80 fare.

Not to mention that we didn’t have any of these problems when we had tram conductors and adequate staffing of the public transport system. Hide and seek ticket inspections will just lead to continually high fare evasion and more of these embarrassing situations for the operators and the State Government.

Although I always travel with a valid ticket, my own encounter with ticket inspectors has also been less than pleasing. You often see them standing in a row like soldiers waiting to attack outside stations such as Melbourne Central, Flinders Street and Box Hill. The other day a ticket inspector decided to study for my concession card with no other purpose than to deliberately hold me up. Not to mention that they remind me of those agents out of the Matrix, waiting for you in their grey suits.

If only they’d bring back the friendly staff.

The weather has been a bit crazy as of late. There has been thunderstorms every day for the past four days, including one that woke me up on Wednesday morning.

Only went to TAFE once this week as I was home Monday with a bit of a cold. Went Tuesday to find that I was pretty much up to date with all the work and was able to finish the module. That meant I didn’t have to go in on Wednesday.

This was just as well as I had a meeting to attend at the townhall on the Box Hill Activity Centre where I was stressing the importance of public transport. The approach of the public transport bureaucrats present was rather negative and the lack of enthusiasm could go along way to explain why little is done to improve Melbourne’s public transport.

I signed up to give SMS.ac a try having received an invitation way back in early 2003. There existed hardly any of the warnings about this site that you can now find plastered all over the web today. I thought it might be handy for sending the occasional free SMS (there did exist some geniune free SMS sites in the past), though I never tried using it, which is just as well as I’ve since heard that they charge these messages as a premium SMS to your friends phone account.

In the mean time i received a fair few spam messages to an email address I didn’t even sign up to their site with, alleging to be from friends. Eventually I did go back and check the site out and all, again I didn’t find much use for it and found it annoying as hell because they had some flash player thingamajigs that keep blaring mobile phone ring tones.

At some stage earlier this year, however, I started getting annoying SMS messages from SMS.ac. I didn’t think much of it, except they were annoying so I went back to the site once again trying to figure out how to stop it. All to no avail. Little did I know I was being charged for the messages which were being sent as “premium content”. Having gone back to the site again, the only way you could find any instructions on how to disable these messages is if you go to billing (which I didn’t since I never gave them any credit card details) or closing your account (which I did go to eventually due to sheer frustration). I certainly had never requested such ‘premium’ messages through their site or my phone.

Though the question is, how can charges be made to a phone when such services were never requested, especially through the mobile phone itself. This is clearly a scam. Even Telstra’s own Customer Terms clearly state that such charged content can only be accessed “from your mobile
phone”.

Telstra’s customer service people of course proved to be unhelpful and claimed that Telstra is powerless and has no responsibility over such ‘premium’ SMS billing. They told me I had to contact 5th Finger for any refunds, who in turn were referring me back to SMS.ac in the US. That is until I mentioned the magic TIO word back to Telstra and proceeded to lodge a complaint with the ombudsman. They eventually refunded $14 or so (at $0.55 per a message), however, while I was pleased that they refunded something I’m not even entirely sure if this amount is accurate. I have some indication that it may have been more than this. Though the fact that it’s a pre-paid account certainly doesn’t help.

In addition it appears that Vodafone NZ were doing some investigations over SMS.ac.

So stay away from SMS.ac at all costs. Though if you’ve been stung already, don’t take your phone company for face value that they can’t do anything because they can. If you’re in Australia there’s TIO, you could also report it to ACCC as a scam (in which case be sure to mention that 5th Finger, as the local company, facilitating it) or if you’re fed up with spam from SMS.ac then you could report it to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (again if you mention their local links, that is 5th Finger, this could help).

The weather couldn’t have been better today, so decided to use the opportunity to go for a bike ride. Just did the usual, rode up Whitehorse Rd then took the Anniversary trail (former outer circle railway line). Then I took the Yarra trail and kinda cheated by taking the train home. It’s the first time I’ve done this since the weather got colder. The train was noticeably cosy for a Sunday service that only runs every 20 minutes. People must actually go out on Sundays, if only the State Government knew this!

Also took some photos while I was out. Though it is a bit tricky trying to ride a bike and take photos at the same time.

Power went off for another 40 minutes tonight. With all the blackouts (along with surges/dips) we’re getting lately, one would think we’re living in a third world country. Must be time to lodge some complaints. Once again it went off at the most inconvenient time (6:15pm), just as everyone is cooking dinner etc. Not to mention that it came on just before my pizza arrived.

Well I have done it, I’ve joined that tribe where they all walk around wearing white earbuds. I’m now the proud owner of one of these iPod things. It’s one of the slightly larger ones with the colour screens as I decided I’d rather store my entire music collection on it. No messing around with shuffling my songs around to keep fresh ones on the iPod. It also can store all my photos, which is handy, although the small LCD display will never compare to viewing them in full size on a computer.

I’ve pondered buying an iPod in the past before they had really even become as popular as they are now. The cost was an obstacle though thanks to my recent 21st birthday that was kinda resolved. My more recent conern was the fact that you can’t play OGG Vorbis files with an iPod. Though it was the fact that I have a relatively long commute to Brunswick that was the last straw and made portable music a rather urgent matter.

Of course, there are some alternatives to the iPod that can play OGG but nothing that compares (not to mention that they are mostly Windows CE based). So I’ve frantically been re-encoding my entire CD collection into AAC. I can hear open source purists cringing already. However, AAC is slightly better quality than OGG and it is an open standard, although the patients don’t do justice to open source. None the less, I still have a copy of the OGG files floating around, not to mention the original cds. Ultimately I should probably encode my collection to a lossless format someday.

The one other downside is that they no longer ship with firewire cables. This is annoying since my iBook actually has a firewire port. So any PC iPod owners out there without a need for the firewire cable? Otherwise, I’m off to the Apple Edu Store to buy one.

Not long after the train system was privatised, various adjustments were made by Connex. One of these involved stopping a few express trains at Surrey Hills station. At first it was only a very small handful of services, so to most people it went unnoticed. Though some time later this was increased, so now a fair number of express services stop there.

The justification was that travel time would not be increased as improvements to track meant time would be regained further down the line. However, travel time is probably not the biggest and only concern of passengers. For one, by doing this it provides less room for late running services to catch up, thus contributing towards unreliability. Another factor is that it complicates the timetable and creates more confusion for passengers. There are already enough variations in train stopping patterns without trains stopping here.

In addition, it is usually trains that don’t stop at Glenferrie and sometimes even Camberwell that gain the extra stop at Surrey Hills. This may seem reasonable at first, since surely these lucky ’super express’ passengers could put up with an extra stop? Well in actual fact these express trains are usually very packed to begin with. Which brings us to the next point….

The biggest problem this creates is that more passengers are being crammed into already overcrowded express trains. It isn’t so obvious when travelling from the city, you can’t tell that you are crammed in like a sardine because a few extra people will be getting off at Surrey Hills. Though it’s more obvious when you’re on a crowded city bound train.

This morning while taking the 7:56am City Loop train from Box Hill, I managed to take these photos. They’re rather crude, though they do show how crowded the train was before it stopped at Surrey Hills. You can’t tell from the photo, but few, if any people get off when the train stops here (no one in the carriage got off from what I could tell). So here they are:

Probably the last consideration remaining is what it all means for Surrey Hills people. It may seem like a nice gesture to give them some express trains, though in reality I don’t think a handful of trains is going to be that useful. Even with Glenferrie which gets far more express services, enough don’t stop there that you can’t rely on getting an express train every time you travel from there in peak hour. One might also argue that a fair number of people use Surrey Hills. Even if that is true, I can only think that they may in future find some justification in stopping express services at Canterbury, East Camberwell, Auburn, Hawthorn… you get the idea.

A better solution might be to co-ordinate services so that passengers can transfer to an express from a stopping-all-stations train.

Yes, that’s right. On Monday this week, I was sent home from TAFE. But for no other reason than being too good with computers.

While everyone were to be using Typequick, one of those typing tutor programs, I can already type faster than 60 words per a minute (WPM) with good accuracy. The teacher had already asked if any of us could type fast so he set me up on one of the most advanced lessons in Typequick. All I did was concentrate on typing accurately at a comfortable pace and although I can’t remember exactly what the results were now, my accuracy was close enough to 100% with my typing speed mostly well over 60 WPM. So the teacher said I could go home.

But he said I didn’t have to go back for another two weeks, since the whole module was a basic introduction to computers. Though it was only going to be Monday and Tuesday this week and next week anyway. So here I am, sitting back, enjoying the sunny (but chilli) weather. Though I have had a few things to do.

Well today pretty much completes the first week of starting a new course. I’m now doing Electronic Publishing - Certificate IV at Brunswick TAFE. Although I have no idea what I want to do for a career and it was more or less recommended to me, it actually seems quite interesting.

The course is mainly concerning things related to the prepress process though it should be useful for working in other areas as well. Obviously the whole field has changed massively since computers took over. Jobs used to be really specific, i.e. typesetting, though with computers the field has become more generalised. This week has been mostly introductory stuff though at least the tours of the campus aren’t so boring and are not just the usual “here’s the Library, oh and here’s the Canteen”. Instead we took a tour of the facilities including a look at the printing presses and an even closer look at the flexography presses. So while most of our work should be on computer, it looks to be fun.

In other news, we were hit by a partial blackout on Monday night, right at the most inconvenient time of night when everyone is arriving home. Rang the power company and they told me that there was nothing wrong with the power in the area. I later confirmed that some of our neighbours didn’t have power (while to make matters more complicated, some others still did have power). Fortunately the power was restored about an hour later, possibly when they realised it was half the neighbourhood and not just us!

Yesterday while I was dropping by RMIT to lodge my application for changing to this new course, I stopped to take some photos. Though the campus was noticeably quiet due to the fact that it was holidays, the following was of interest:

Chris has suggested that they could house students there. I certainly think it would be rather amusing if it were used for classes It is in fact Building 19 of RMIT which was formerly the Police Watch House. More recently the building has been used as an art studio. It’s now a construction site.

Today I went mountain biking in the You Yangs which was being organised by my brother through the outdoors club. The weather was a little wet for it and it would help if I rode my bike a bit more to get my fitness up before attempting anything like this. Fortunately we were never far from the car park, where the only shelter in the area could be sought (that is; inside the vehicles).