Chokolait – delicious!

ChokolaitHow spoiled are chocolate lovers in Melbourne? There’s plenty of good retail chocolate – my favourite, the South Australian import, Haighs. But more and more, chocolate shops are about the experience of sitting down, drinking and eating in cosy surroundings – the whole indulgence thing wrapped up.

Until now, Koko Black had this wrapped up – still do really, but there’s a new contender on the scene, just around the corner from Koko Black in the Royal Arcade, you’ll find Chokolait. I really can’t say which is better, and that alone is high praise. Chokolait matches it’s nearby neighbor in almost every aspect and is ahead in one : a lack of queues! Yes, for now at least, the location in a less fashionable arcade has left it relatively undiscovered. So, if you haven’t already made this your own discovery, it’s time you did.

From their card:
The Chokolait Hub
Shop 8, The Hub Arcade
318 Little Collins Street
Ph: +613 9639 6188
www.chokolait.com.au
(at the moment the website seems to be down!)

Petrol to hit $25/litre!

Humber Super SnipeI remember in the early 70’s when the world was experiencing it’s first “Oil Shock”. Cruising along, dad at the wheel of the old Humber Super Snipe (kewl eh?) when the interviewee on the radio made the dire prediction that petrol would get to $1 a gallon. (Yes, it was definitly gallons, the ‘metrication’ program ran from 1960 to 1988).

My memory says we were paying about 40c/gallon (about 9c/litre) at the time. The predictions, equivalent to 22c/l., were exceeded within 5 years.

petrol at $1.48.5Well, last week the predictions were for $1.50/litre and sure enough, today I was filling up at $1.48.5. It won’t be long! Fortunately for me, the tank on my little CB250 could only hold 12.5 l. so I’m still only using 4 l./100km. I can see the current scooter craze is only going to strengthen in the coming years.

So, what about the future? I can’t see the rate of increase slowing – carbon taxes and dwindling resources will almost certainly see it increase, but for arguments sake, lets assume a constant figure. My youngest child is now about the same age I was then, so it’s a given that by the time she’s my age she’ll be paying at least $25/litre for petrol.

I think I’ll walk!

google censorship, national security & pepsi

Like most google map watchers, I’ve heard the debates about censorship on Google Maps. Pressure from governments, back room deals, conspiracy theories… it all gets a good workout on the forums, lists and blogs. Until now, the common theme has always been national security… mostly defence installations.
Pepsi HeadquartersNow, it seems that money buys you anonymity. Or maybe Pepsi is really just a front for a chemical weapons factory… whatever, the reason, there is a neat square of blurred imagery (looks like photoshop’s ‘pallete knife’ is the filter of choice) in among photos of excellent quality, and that square obscures the headquarters of PepsiCo. Draw your own conclusions.

‘allo, ‘allo, ‘allo!

Garbage truck stolenCredit for spotting this goes to my good lady, but this week’s theft of a Garbage truck, as reported on page 28 the Moreland Leader (December 10, 2007) seems to be an “open and shut case” as they say in crime reporting parlance.

I only hope the local plods are reading the paper too, because on page 16 is a red hot clue to the whereabouts of the missing truck. Tucked among the Letters to Santa is this intriguing admission from young Fabian of Pascoe Vale:
Garbage truck: ...for Christmas I would like a garbage truck and a digger...
Surely we’ve got the culprit red handed! He might even be wearing a full red suit… can’t be hard to spot someone like that, can it? Hang on a minute: did he say he wanted a digger too?!

the union scare campaign…

Yesterday, I was asked a question from a newspaper quiz “Who is the premier of Queensland?”. I remember Peter Beattie, but I also remember his graceful resignation – I have to admit, I’d never heard of Anna Bligh, but today I’m a fan!

The Spring issue of the NTEU journal NEXUS features a quote from her that displays an eloquence, intelligence and incisiveness rarely seen in politics these days:

“I believe the question was whether 90 per cent of the members of my cabinet are union members. I think the answer to that is no. I believe that 100 per cent of my cabinet are members of relevant trade unions.

Not only are they members of their relevant trade unions; they are proud members of their relevant trade unions. They are proud of that, because trade unions have been one of the organisations that have built this country.

They secured the eight-hour day. They secured decent working conditions so that people could feed their families and be safe in their workplaces. There is no shame in it – none whatsoever.

The member wants to come snivelling in here doing the dirty work of John Howard. We do not resile for one minute from the fact that people on this side of the House care about the interests of working people. In terms of the talent of my cabinet, I will stack them up one by one against every runt of the litter that the other side lines up.”

Stirring stuff! Sadly, it is a bit of a lone voice in a landscape where the government’s cowardly campaign should never have gained traction.

I am constantly amazed at how few of my colleagues make the connection between the past work of Unions and their own comfortable circumstances. I certainly don’t agree with everything unions say and do, but the reality is that there are just as many lunatics on the conservative side, and if we, as workers with families and children who will be workers in the future fail to support the unions now, then the future lack of balance will be to our detriment.

Join a union today.

Bandwidth thief!

Last month I got ‘shaped’ – almost two weeks of excruciatingly slow internet – it was horrible. My ISP’s usage page only gives a total, not day by day, but I’ve never gone close before so it was a bit of a surprise. I got a daily report from the ISP and it didn’t tell me much – no pattern I could follow anyway.

October was a new month, I was going to keep a close eye on things. I installed the delightful Net Usage Item plugin for Firefox, but was dismayed as I watched 20% of my bandwidth disappear in 3 days. I could account for about 400Mb – a couple of downloads I’d been putting off until I got my speed back – but 700+Mb was still unaccounted for. I suspected all sorts of things, but none of it really added up, so tonight I sat down with a couple of tools to find out what I could.

The first shock was my network traffic – almost a constant 50 Kilobytes per second! – 180Mb per hour… yikes!

Quick, download Little Snitch and work this out. Obviously something that’s using that much bandwidth will also be using a fair chunk of CPU, so it wasn’t hard to narrow it down… actually, I got it first go… Agent. That’s right – quit the app and the network practically flatlines.

Bandwidth grab 1

Start it up and the network goes ballistic again!

Bandwidth grab 2

So, what’s going on here? I don’t care much, I’ve removed Google Desktop for a start! I’m guessing that disabling the ‘index Gmail’ option in the app would probably have had the same effect, but I’m in no position to mess with my bandwidth this month – I definitely don’t want to be shaped again!

hot or not?

This week, I had occasion to play for a few minutes with the latest toy of technolusters – the Apple iTouch. Definitely one of the ‘must haves’ of the decade, obviously, if I lived in a location where the iPhone was available, then I’d probably graduate to lusting after that instead, but for now let’s just say I am smitten.

One of my colleagues at work has a Nokia N95 which has all sorts of fantastic whistles and bells – certainly more bang than the iTouch, and with GPS, the sort of thing I usually get all frothy at the mouth over, but it just doesn’t do it for me. The whole ugly slidy silver box thing is a bit off-putting.

Seems I am not alone. I laughed out loud at the b3ta newsletter this week (not unusual in itself), but this time I wasn’t laughing at the content – it was the subscription links that cracked me up.

iPod Touch: b3ta-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Nokia n810: b3ta-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

In other words, Nokia users, nick off!

who do you trust?

With the Australian election underway, we are being bombarded by all the usual political ads, but one particularly puzzles me… The government keep going on about how 70% of the opposition front bench have come from a union background and that this is somehow supposed to be a bad thing.

Well, thanks to wikipedia and a little research, I found that 60% of the government front bench are solicitors and barristers. Is that supposed to make us feel any better?

Certainly not if you have a look around the web for ‘trusted profession’ surveys, where lawyers, insurance brokers, real estate agents and journalists seem to rate in the same 40-50% ‘trust’ strata as unionists. If you add in that Mark Vaile was a real estate agent and Tony Abbot was a journalist, then you’d find that more than 70% of them have belonged to professions with an image problem.

Of course, they’ve all taken a massive downward step since their earlier careers, because politicians are almost always judged the least trusted profession in surveys, only beaten into last place by used car salesmen. Would you buy a used government from this man?

Sony Bravia goes stop motion

the sony bravia adWhen Sony released the now famous ad with the bouncy balls there was huge speculation about how they did it. Was it computer generated, was it faked – the discussion was quickly stopped as eye witness accounts told of the amazing photo shoot. The next ad was the exploding paint – again brilliant and memorable, but less of a mystery. Still interesting because of the logistics.

So, it must be a bit of a scary assignment coming up with the next ad. It’s a hard act to follow. Glad to report that they’ve done it again! The new Sony Bravia Play Doh ad is another masterpiece. I’ve just watched it again. Some of it looks like it’s been computer generated, but other parts look crisply real. The tradition of these ads is no computer special effects, so I’m inclined to think that’s been preserved.

Amazing work… can’t wait to hear how they pulled this off!

Didn’t have to wait long 🙂

a new web direction…

Web Directions South () is over for another year and I feel a bit like old Juan Antonio Samaranch when I say it was definitely the best one ever!
Everyone was left buzzing with excitement by the closing keynote, Mark Pesce, whose inspirational speech had an effect like a coaches address at half time in today’s AFL grand final. To focus on Mark’s piece though doesn’t do justice to the rest of the stellar line-up and the generous way they gave their knowledge and made themselves available during the breaks and social events. A the other end of the spectrum ,I chatted over breakfast with the charming and quietly spoken Bert Bos – acknowledged as the ‘inventor’ of css. I work with his baby every day and there I am being asked for any ideas that might be incorporated in future versions… pinch me! In between these two remarkable bookends there were at least a half a dozen other brilliant presentations that I hope will make a difference to the way I work: Andy Clarke, Brian Fling, Scott Berkun, Adrian Holovaty, George Oates… the list goes on!

If you missed it, well, that’s a shame, but it doesn’t mean you won’t feel the effects. Most of the presentations will be available on slideshare, presumably tagged with wds07, there will be podcasts available on the Web Directions site. I’m sure there will also be plenty of photos on flickr, blog posts via technorati and loads of other stuff.

the spoiler

Even if you don’t follow up on anything else, I feel have to give the plot away. Each of the three conferences I’ve attended has accurately predicted the web landscape. ’05 was all: ‘here are these wonderful standards and tools finally coming to maturity, get out there and do good stuff with them’. ’06 was: ‘standards is going mainstream, focus, refine and extend’. This year: ‘mobile’. That’s it! when I get back home, I’m going to check my notes and see if the mobile web was even mentioned at 06. This year, I think it occupied at least 30% of the airtime… amazing! I mean, I knew it was coming, but this isn’t a quiet little wedge creeping into the pie chart of our webstats… this is a whole new pie!

So, dear reader, the message is clear. Think standards, think small, move fast or miss out.