Perth's new Freeway River...

Pipes checked after leak chaos

A major burst water main spilt 12,000 kilolitres of water onto the freeway and into Perth businesses... This is terrible in itself, but my comment is on the unbelievable comments from the opposition, proving that any chance they get they'll have a dig.

Quote:

The WA Opposition said the burst pipe was "inexcusable".
"The water-main burst caused havoc on Perth's streets. Hopefully, this disaster will force the Labor Government and the Water Corporation to acknowledge that an independent review of Perth's ageing water, sewerage and drainage infrastructure is required," said Opposition water spokesman Paul Omodei.

I guess it would be the same if the now opposition was in power, but for fks sake, how about being a little constructive...

COPS marathon - 24hr Lockdown... More like 2hr repeatathon

I'm a fan of the TV show COPS, which shows the real life American police officers out on the streets. When the Crime & Investigation channel on Foxtel announced a 24 hour marathon, I thought it would be pretty cool to catch up on some of the episodes I missed.

What they didn't tell us, was the marathon was to have the same few episodes repeated over and over for 24 hours... In case you were wondering, no, I didn't watch for all 24 hours, but it seemed like every time I flicked back over, it was the same episode being replayed. There was the one where the old guy laid some smackdown on a drunk because he drew a knife on him and the one where the whacked dude was standing on his roof with burnt bare feet...

Geez, you guys hyped it up all week on your adverts, making my bro in law all excited, only to be let down... Pretty poor effort people...

Hello, hello...

A bit of mean muscle...

I just installed 'hello' to see how easy it is to add pics to my blog. I normally just link to the pics from my webspace, but this is a seriously good alternative.

Maybe the Yank cops need machine guns?

I saw the most unbelievable story on the news tonight... It was about how an unarmed, as in no guns, bloke who refused to pull over for police was cornered by ten officers firing at his vehicle. This was in a suburban street mind you, and the police fired 95 rounds into/across the 4x4!! Amazingly, one police officer was the only other casualty, besides the driver, in this debarcle. After all that, the driver (suspect) was only struck 4 times and survived, while the 4x4 still had air in it's tyres...

There musn't be much paperwork for cops to do over there, as I believe even if an Australian police officer unholsters their weapon in a 'situation' they have to explain their actions, let alone if they fired it. I'm sure a much simpler/safer outcome would have been to have one officer shoot out the tyres, and thus disable the vehicle, while the other officers remained at a safe distance.

Idiots!!

Home prices... How much higher can they go?

Beazley can't afford home

If a bloke on $200k a year can't afford a home, what's that say for the rest of us? I've never understood the crazy prices that the eastern states have had to put up with. Some places are at least double what Western Australians would be paying for an equivelent property. It seems as though the crazy price hikes are slowing as buyers come to the realisation that it's hard to pay back a $450k+ loan on an average wage.

I was in two minds about buying a $400k home in Perth recently with my fiance and her brother because I would have a $90k loan, after enjoying a year debt free... The truth is $400k doesn't buy a lot of house when you move closer to the city (Our place is around 10-15mins from the city centre). Of course I'm expecting/hoping for a good return on my investment in a couple of years, but who's to say the market wouldn't have slumped when we need/want to sell.

It gets back to logicality... The average wage rises each year by a very small amount, while prices for properties increase dramatically. Even my old 3 bedroom home that I bought for $106k sold for $165k a few years later. I still consider property a solid investment, but it can't keep supplying the returns that it has been.

School kids need to pull their heads in...

Proposed action against driver 'over the top'

I'm sort of in two minds about this one... The driver probably shouldn't have driven the bus away from his route, but I guess if he felt in danger the bus depot would be a safer area to retreat to. I just can't understand why the kids of today are so disrespectful to their elders...

When I was a kid the bus driver stopped once and kicked a couple of kids off, but that was because they were hanging out the windows and being general idiots, not because they were abusing the driver... They deserved it, the consequence was the troublemakers weren't allowed to use the bus service. Totally fair, and the parents accepted it, not like nowadays where their cherubs wouldn't do anything bad and it was all the bus driver's fault...

The bus had become an unsafe place to be as he wasn't able to concentrate on the road, but if he threw the kids off the bus there could've been repercussions because the munchkins were left to be attacked by boogie men and pedophiles. I guess he could've just gone on with the route and ignored the abuse, but the kids would be back the next day to do it all again... How it was done, hopefully they learnt a lesson and by getting the media involved perhaps the parents might learn a thing or two about the behaviour of their kids too...

Welcome to geek world...

I've been a closet geek for many years and have decided to come out... So here I am!! Pheww, that takes a load off my mind... :-D

I've seen Linux mentioned in magazines and the like for ages, but never took any notice of what it was because I thought it was some super difficult programming language or something. So, after reading a couple of articles on what Linux was, I discovered it was actually an alternative operating system to Windows which was open source... ie. FREEEEEBIE, zip, zero, nada... Not in all cases, but in lots you don't have to pay a cent to use it.

With my interest hyped my first play with Linux involved my regular Windows XP installed PC and a Live CD version of Linux called Knoppix. It seemed to boot up fine, and seemed to recognise all of the installed hardware without drama. The Live version runs from your CD drive without inflicting itself on the normal running of your system which is pretty cool.

The bro-in-law brought up his old system (P3 450mhz, 64mb RAM, 6gb hard disk, Win98) which was completely cactus, in that booting windows resulted in an instant crash of the desktop. So with a computer that seriously required a makeover, I decided to format the hard disk and install Ubuntu Linux, after a mate mentioned he had used it. I downloaded the Ubuntu .iso file and installed it onto the hard disk, and boy did it 'chug'. It worked, but not as well as I had hoped. After some more reading I discovered that if I changed the GUI from Gnome (?) to the less resource taxing xcfe the system would seem faster. I never got that far...

I installed a bigger hard disk and another 64mb of ram, more freebies, and then proceeded to install another version of Linux called SimplyMEPIS 3.3 (You can run it from CD like Knoppix if you wish). Now, if you are a novice like me and interested at all in using Linux instead of Windows on your system, this could well be the answer to your prayers.

SimplyMEPIS is easy to install, even more so than windows in some cases, as it happily runs along discovering which hardware makes up your system and installing the appropriate drivers. The best part about it is all of the applications software is installed at the same time. No spending 1-2 hours installing Windows and then another hour installing your word processor, spreadsheet, and the like... It's all on there ready to play with.

Just so you are aware, Windows programs don't work with Linux, so you need Linux specific versions of the software. The office suite that comes with SimplyMEPIS is compatible with MSOffice documents as far as I'm aware, and Firefox comes as standard for web browsing. Internet Explorer is crap anyway, and after writing a few W3C standards approved web pages I know for sure.

After playing with it for a couple of hours I am slowly getting the hang of it, although the nitty gritty (ie. installing other programs) is requiring some internet search time. Speed wise it seems quite reasonable, and I like how it has recognised all the hardware. It sees the other computers on my network and everything. All without me hardly touching the keyboard...

If I didn't use Windows programs like PhotoShop and MovieMaker, I'd probably convert my main system over to Linux.

Some links :
Mepis.org
Knoppix.net
UbuntuLinix.org

The AFL is a 'buzz'...

I don't normally comment on sports, as other than motorsport I don't really follow any, but this weeks story about the AFL football players taking caffeine pills is so ludicrous its worth a comment. My thoughts... Who gives a fk!?! There is no evidence to prove that they enhance a player's ability and they haven't been banned by the AFL governing body, so why has the media chosen to overhype this topic?

On one of the football TV shows a former player mentioned how he came down pretty hard after using a special caffeine concoction during his playing days. He was super-fine and buzzing for the first half of the game, but was pretty stuffed by the second half and for the next week, which would probably have effected his training...

As far as I'm concerned, let all of the players feel free to take them. If they feel the benefit of half a game's buzz is worth the disruption to their sleep patterns etc. good luck to them...