Melbourne, Melbourne!!

I love pictures and this picture tells a story. It's taken from the AIS data for Melbourne and Port Phillip. AIS is a system for ships that's like aircraft transponders. It broadcasts a range of data including course and speed, type of vessel and destination.

This picture shows why the Port of Melbourne is the busiest port in Australia. The green ships are all cargo vessels - most, but not all of them container vessels.

The most interesting "vessel" in this picture though is the little turquoise coloured vessel on the left of the picture near the word "Lara". When I interrogated that vessel it informed me that it had a speed of 124 knots and a course of 187 degrees. It also informed me that it was a "SAR aircraft" so that explains the speed I guess. It's very close to the position of Avalon Airport so I suspect some training is going on.

Storms at Melbourne Storm

The story so far, as told in the media, seems to be this:

$20,000 a week - a total of $1.7 million - was being paid for a "hospitality tent" when in fact that tent was being provided as part of another contract. Instead the money was being paid to an unknown number of players in breach of the salary cap. This was discovered when the NRL salary cap auditor was tipped off to the existence of a number of side agreements, between Storm and player(s), which were held in a separate room at Storm HQ. We are told that only the ex-CEO knew anything about this. His ex-deputy has been stood down. Neither the NRL, the Storm Board, the owners of Storm, the other executives at Storm, the players, nor it seems anyone else knew about these payments.

I'm actually finding all of this a little difficult to understand. If I was investigating this, or if I were the owners, I'd like some questions answered:

1. What was the nature of the agreements found in the "other room" and who were they with? What did those other parties think they were for?
2. What form did the payments take and was that form such that it should have been questioned?
3. What did the company's auditors think of the regular payment of such a large amount of money and in conducting their audits what documentation did they review for these payments?
4. What review process did the Audit Committee of the Storm Board undertake with respect to payments being made and the correlation between contractual obligations and the payments made under contracts?
5. How is it that payments of this sort could be made and yet no other member of the executive team was aware of them? What control mechanisms does the Storm have in place for the review and control of payments?

At the moment one person appears to be taking the fall for this. I don't know whether that's right or wrong. However, generally accepted corporate governance standards provide checks and balances which mean that payments of this magnitude and duration should be identified and questioned.

No doubt there are simple explanations for these questions and we will hear them in the fullness of time. I await the investigation with interest.

The Australia and New Zealand Alcohol Induced Violence Blitz

Over this weekend police in Australia and NZ are running a blitz on "alcohol fuelled violence". They are out in force cracking down on people engaging in drunken behaviour and violence.

First thing to say is that I like a drink as much as anyone else I've met. But this situation, in Melbourne at least, is out of hand. We keep reading about manslaughter in close proximity to licensed premises, bashings....on and on. I live very close, read very close, to 8 licensed premises. Barely a weekend goes by that someone doesn't vomit in the lane-way or have a massive, alcohol fired, domestic dispute at 3:00am. Fights, drag races, shouting, vomiting...you name it it happens.

So what I want explained to me is this: the law in this State says that it is illegal to serve a person who is intoxicated. In fact I think it might be illegal to be on a licensed premises if you are intoxicated. So the people who are gob-smackingly drunk, falling over, vomiting, fighting, screaming drunk - somebody has served them alcohol to get like that. I'm not talking one or two people. I'm talking lots of people every weekend. So why aren't the licensing laws being properly enforced? The fines for non-compliance are big, you can lose your license and you can be shutdown for periods of time - like a suspension. So why aren't these laws being enforced?

I know that this isn't a solution to our drinking issues, that needs cultural change. What I do know is that if you can't get a drink when you shouldn't then you are less likely to be roaming the streets drunk and you are less likely to engage in acts of violence, public domestic disputes, vomiting... That makes it less likely that we will have the problems we currently have. So as far as blitzes are concerned what about having a real blitz on licensees? Let's take the law seriously and stop serving people who have had too much. Let's get the drinkers out of the premises and on their way home before they have too much. That way we might all get some peace.

Happy Christmas!!

The Big T - Part Two

I was so frustrated at Telstra/Bigpond's non-action when I posted last time on this, that I tweeted the link to @Telstra. Quite quickly I got a response back on Twitter asking me to go to a web page and link in to the support mechanism.

This has been the highlight of the saga. A guy called Mark has stuck with me and been able to escalate stuff and get action. So before I go any further I'd like to say that Mark has done a great job and that Telstra/Bigpond need a few more of him.

Mark went away and explored the problem and came back and said - Tuesday 17 at around 1pm you should have a static IP. OK, it's a wait but what else can we do?

On Tuesday morning Bigpond was down for maintenance - OK now I see what's happening. The problem was that when it came back up I visited and could see immediately that the Additional Services functionality wasn't working still. Mark, true to his word, came back at 1:00pm and said "sorry the fix didn't work". However he had escalated the problem and had high hopes of an outcome. Waiting, waiting, then on Friday 20th at around midday a tweet from @BigpondTeam and an email from Mark alerted me to the fact that finally, nearly 3 weeks after applying, I had a static IP.

The advice was to go to a page link, look at the FAQ instructions and activate the static IP that way. Off I went...you beauty, at last.

So the link told me to change my username from @bigpond.com to @static.bigpond. So I did that and the link went down and stayed down...

Back to Mark who escalated to the product owner and got the same advice, so I tried some more. Still the link stayed down. If I went back to the original logon it came up and it had the static IP, but if I followed Telstra's advice it went down and stayed down.

At Mark's request I went to tech support. The less said about that the better. I was very civil - they're just part of a broken system - but again they didn't get the issue and chased red herrings. Every time...Finally during a lengthy call I came back from rebooting the modem, again, to find that the tech support person had simply vanished from the line.

Back to Mark again and a request to do a chat session with tech support and reset my password - whatever turns you on, so I did that but to no avail.

Finally I suggested to Mark that the FAQ is wrong, it appears that you don't need to change the logon, the static IP just tags you and stays with you. He wasn't sure but said he'd check it out. We wished each other a good weekend and so ended the week.

This is where @lbanister came in. He knew what Telstra didn't know: for the last couple of years you haven't had to change your log in for a static IP - it just comes along and stays along. @lbanister had been waiting longer than I had for his static IP and got it at about the same time. Thanks for your help mate.

So one final strike for Telstra/Bigpond: They still don't know their systems. People like Mark are the only reason you keep using this company, because there is no other good reason. The rest of Bigpond has lousy service and product knowledge. How is it that the product owner doesn't know what customers need to do to activate his/her product? If you are the product owner for static IP this is a great big fail and you need the sack: first principle is know your product and you clearly don't and you don't appear to care. How else could you let a situation like this occur?

So coming to you this morning from my shiny new static IP and much thanks to Mark...

BTW it is raining, and I mean seriously raining, in Melbourne this morning. Melbourne airport reports over 50mm of rain since 9:00am yesterday - not even 24 hours and it is pissing down still. Just what we need after the heat of the last couple of weeks. Just what the reservoirs need as well.

Bach Organ Works Marathon

Just a quick note for people in Melbourne. There's a very special event going on right now at the Melbourne Town Hall. Calvin Bowman is playing all of Bach's Organ works (except those of spurious attribution) in one sitting.

The event started at 8:00am today and is expected to finish sometime after midnight tonight. The last work will be the Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

That video is pretty rough and ready - the iPhone struggled with the contrast levels in the hall. However, it gives you some idea! The console for the organ has been set up on the floor of the auditorium in a pool of light. It gives a unique insight into the way a big organ is played. You can watch as he pulls the pre-sets, uses the different manuals and plays the base pedals. It's particularly interesting when he plays a long passage on the base pedals with both hands on his knees!

The atmosphere in the hall is great. Around 600 people at any one time by my estimate and a respectful hush. At each break people leave and others arrive so that there is a constant turnover of people. I think everyone there understands what a supreme effort this must be. I imagine that Calvin will be very sore and tired tomorrow.

This event is part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival and its free. So get on down there!

TrafficTweet - Twitter that works!

I'm not convinced about Twitter, because at the core of Twitter is a problem: Twitter is the pumping station and all the rest of us are simply sampling the torrent from the fire hose. And most of us just give up. We can't sort the crap from the cream and there's no value in most of what's coming out of the hose.

When we deal with data in our daily lives we use a kind of three-step process. We say "What?", "So What?" and "What Now?". Put another way those three questions are saying "what's the data?", "what does it mean to me?" and "what am I going to do about it?". With Twitter we just get the "what" and more what, and then a bit more what. The companies that are making some sense to me are the companies that are creating apps that answer the next question: "what does it mean to me?" Because once I have help with that then I can get on with doing my stuff which is "what am I going to do about it?".

That's a long winded way of starting out talking about TrafficTweet. The name's pretty obvious, it's an iPhone app that lets me tweet about traffic issues. It gives me a nice interface to do that, means I don't have to write 140 characters of War and Peace, and keeps track of my location so that it puts the data in a sensible place. That tweet is then sent to Twitter (more on that later) and then collected back by TrafficTweet and displayed on a map in a form that I can interrogate easily.

Crowd sourced data, a great interface and all the hard work of synthesising and arranging the data done for me. I can get on with deciding to take another road or postpone my trip. I can get back to being an executive rather than a data analyst. The interesting thing is that all those tweets generated from TrafficTweet are available to everyone on Twitter. So Mobomo, the developers of TrafficTweet can only keep ahead of the crowd by the value added analysis and presentation that they undertake on the data.

I think this is a great app and the more apps like this we see the more chance Twitter has of prospering rather than churning. But come on all you people in Melbourne and the rest of Australia: Get onto the app store, download TrafficTweet (it's free ATM) and start tweeting about traffic. You'll add value and I won't feel so alone DownUnder. To see what the app can do just go into the app and search for "Los Angeles".

Mobomo's site is here.

Melbourne in Spring

The only thing you have to know about Melbourne at this time of this year is that everyone wishes it would stop blowing! We've had a succession of strong low pressure systems through here and it's driving everyone mad. Not as bad as the west coast of Tasmania though. They reported sustained winds of 80 knots at one stage last week!

I haven't managed to do another session in the Savage Classic yet - my instructor has had a rough time over the last couple of weeks and the last thing is that he's now nursing some cracked ribs! I'll keep you posted as soon as the next session comes along.

What I have been spending some time on though is making a table top. I fossicked around and found a piece of reclaimed river redgum. It's about 1200 x 600mm and around 38mm thick. It's a beautiful piece of timber. Like many of these slabs however it has a cup across the width.

So I've been planing away the sides to make the top flat. I've been using a low angle smoothing plane. Removing the heavy stock with the mouth wide open and then closing the mouth up to get a finish.

As you can see from the photos (sorry about the quality) there is beautiful fiddleback figure in the wood. But that of course means that the grain goes every which way. I've sharpened a secondary bevel on the plane blade to bring the included cutting angle up to around 50 degrees. I tried to remove the first major cut with a scrub plane but I got too much chip out so I reverted to slower work with the jack plane and the smoother.

My old man started out life as a carpenter and joiner. He reckons I don't need to remove all the cup - just make sure that it's "flat enough".

This is great cardio vascular exercise and it's doing wonders for my upper body and fore arms! I'll have to find another piece after this to keep up with the exercise regime!

The way a day should be!

Tuesday was a dodgy sort of day in Melbourne. As I headed for the airport at 0700 it was raining and looking generally crap. Check in was easy and Sherry - the captain on the flight - did a good job of getting us to Sydney, smoothly and on time.

During our descent we popped out of the cloud at around 8,800' and serendipitously just about over the little airstrip I was eventually heading for. That made me feel positive about our chances of flying. The ARFOR was for a trough to approach from the west with showers, rain, low cloud ahead of it. Maybe some TSRA.

When we got on the ground in Sydney it was raining and the vis progressively worsened. Maybe this wasn't going to work. The weather radar (search on the Apple App Store for Pocket Weather AU if you are in Aussie) showed a great band of rain across the Southern Highlands but it was clearing to the east and appeared to have nothing following it.

An hour later and we were at the Mittagong airstrip (YMIG). Its 06/24 1200 metres of sealed strip at an elevation around 1,840 feet with a row of hangars. It was a WWII training strip and is now run by the Berrima district aero club.

The surrounds are a little tricky - the strip is in a hollow with higher ground in several directions. The wind favoured 06 but with a left cross wind. Final approach to 06 has some high ground so you sort of follow the terrain down as you approach. I tended to aim well into the strip as there was a little curl over going on final with some sink.

I love flying the Storm Century 5XL - it's a wonderful aircraft, a LSA with a cruise in excess of 120 knots TAS. It handles so smoothly and responsively, a great roll rate and very light control forces.

First flight we headed off for some upper air work, stalls, steep turns and a general fly about. There was scattered cloud at about 5,000' so we stayed just under that and had a barrel of fun!!

Returning to the strip was a little different. Some mechanical turbulence, a little sink and some xwind. Nothing major but enough to make you fly the aircraft.

The next flight was in a way even more fun. My passenger just loved the aircraft, after we had been flying around for a bit we headed back and then he said "can we just keep doing this for a while longer?". A man after my own heart - there's nothing better than just flying around (except perhaps, as Rattie said, messing about it boats).

Finally however we had to pack it in and get into the car to head back to Sydney airport. I managed to change my flight so that I left almost as soon as we got to the airport. 80 minutes later I was back in Melbourne. So from YMML in the morning and back to YMML in the evening all within 12 hours with some great flying at Mittagong in the meantime.

Isn't that how every day is supposed to be?