““Thank you,” said Himmler, who found the Windows file management system a diabolical confoundment. And they accuse me of crimes against humanity, he thought as he settled himself in at his desk. Wilhelm Gates, you are a beast, and your family will pay.”
— John Birmingham, Final Impact
Popularity: 10% [?]
We have a decent wodge of credit with Amazon (a friend paying us back for some stuff) but not much idea what to do with it. Our original plan — pre-orders of Spore and Wrath of the Lich King have gone out the window as they only want to send the former via priority courier (costs US$40!) and they won’t ship the latter out of the US…
(Yes, yes, we could probably do the relay thing, but the point of a pre-order for WotLK would be to have it on launch day, so…)
Now thinking maybe all six seasons of Scrubs, but that doesn’t account for all of it.
Time was I’d have had absolutely no trouble just buying $1000 worth of CDs in a single batch. Clearly things have changed!
Popularity: 15% [?]
The question of “which Mac?” has been resolved. In the first instance we’re going to pick up a cheap Macbook, because the old Dell laptop is kinda crappy. My partner can use it for classes, we can use it when traveling, and should my employment circumstances change such that I’d be needing to work both out of the office and occasionally away from home, well, it’d suffice.
Later on I’ll take another look at a Mac Pro, though, as a kick-arse desktop+server-replacement combo.
Fixed the Toppy, which has been giving us trouble pretty much since the ABC renamed to ABC1/ABC2. Nice to finally have that sorted, really just required sitting down and stuffing about with it for a bit. The next step is to chuck on an autoexpiry addon that’ll do things like “delete 7:30 Report older than 48 hours”.
I’ve gotten fairly bored with Warcrack. Don’t have time for the end-game content, so it’s all just more of the same. We’ve renewed our City of Heroes subscriptions to play around with that for a bit, shall have to see how it goes. We’ve spent some time playing today (both sides) and have been enjoying it.
Am considering the merits of cancelling my WoW account until the next expansion comes out. Will give it a few weeks and see how I feel about it.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Useful discovery: iTunes will authorise against multiple iTunes Store accounts, and this flows through to AppleTV. If the lack of useful captioning weren’t an issue I could absolutely see subscribing to 10 or so TV shows — the price is similar to buying a season on DVD but you get ‘em as soon as they air in the US, with no ads, and no mucking about converting for playback. 10 shows a year is cheaper than even basic cable here, and much better value too.
Last weekend I got fed up with Vista making things break and nuked the PC, installing XP and using it only for games and video encodes. The “main” machine is my old first-generation G5 iMac hooked up to a decent display, and it’s perfectly usable though I can really notice the difference between this old machine and the first-gen Core2 Duo iMac at work. Not going to do anything in any great hurry, but this does rather confirm for me that I should be looking to update to a newer Mac at home some time this year.
We had a large bin delivered on Wednesday and have spent some of the long weekend clearing out accumulated rubbish. I’ve finally chucked the last remaining big box of cables and we’ve gained maybe 1/3rd of our study back. The kitchen is also looking much better. By spreading this out over the weekend we’ve been able to get stuff done without feeling like we’ve given up much time to do it.
Weight-loss continues, slowly. I’ve lost about 7kg since we started this 3-ish months ago. Our scales have given up, so we’ll need to buy new ones. 7kg is a drop in the ocean — overall I want to lose 60kg from my starting point — but hey, 10% is 10%. It all feels quite viable, I’ve quit with the obsessive calorie-counting now, but that stage is useful for getting your head into the right place.
The new Portishead album sounds a bit mechanically goth. It reminds me a bit of Switchblade Symphony, but with more drum machine. Not sure how I feel about it, will have to give it a few more listens.
Popularity: 32% [?]
Transmission is very nifty. And I thought uTorrent on Windows was good!
Also, good e-commerce experience of the day: Book-a-Bin. Nice simple straightforward “specify what sort of bin you want, when, and where” system, handles the payment, the bin simply arrives when you asked for it and goes away as booked. Have used it before, and have booked another bin to cart more of our accumulated rubbish this weekend.
Popularity: 26% [?]
Why yes, I can.
The dryer function in our five-year-old Ariston unit died last spring. I’ve been resisting buying a standalone dryer ever since, largely because it’s been sunny enough of the time to use the washing line, though also through simple procrastination.
In any event, winter looms. The weather is getting darker and wetter, and opportunities to dry clothes on the line are becoming few and far between. So early this week I finally gave in and ordered a Fisher & Paykel unit. It arrived yesterday, and has been working Just Fine taking care of our backlog since.
Unlike the older-style dryers I’m used to this thing doesn’t leave clothes horribly wrinkled. It also doesn’t take hours to get the job done. The latter is almost certainly helped by the washer being a front-load unit that doesn’t leave clothes dripping wet at the end of the wash.
I do still feel a little uneasy about using a dryer again — I was enjoying hanging clothes on the line, and it made me feel just a little bit virtuous — but the alternative when it’s raining is no clean clothes. Not a great look work-wise. So.
Popularity: 22% [?]
One of the key reasons why property in the “inner” suburbs (i.e., those where there is any reasonable public transport) is so expensive is the negative gearing system we have. In simple terms, if you buy a property as an investment by borrowing, any interest paid is tax-deductible.
The idea is that it encourages people to buy investment properties to increase the rental pool.
The hitch is that there is no such tax deduction for owner-occupied property, so essentially the same level of income provides far greater buying power as an investor than as an occupier.
Making interest paid on a mortgage on your primary residence tax deductible, with various limitations — e.g., a cap on the amount/year deductible, some sort of limits to stop people simply re-drawing on the mortgage to effectively live tax-free forever — would rebalance this without causing the problems that made the Federal Government run scared last time they tried to take away negative gearing.
Popularity: 74% [?]
There are any number of reasons why being a renter in Australia is something you want to avoid if you possibly can. They mostly boil down to this: renters are second-class citizens. It is assumed that you are either poor (and thus safe to ignore) or it’s merely a temporary state until you buy something and become a Real Person.
And thus we arrive at the current source of stress and anxiety.
Three and a bit months ago we were served with a 120-day Notice to Vacate plus a letter saying we were welcome to re-apply for a lease on the house we’re living in. We’ve been here for going on three years, and they pulled the same stunt last time. Their goal is to avoid periodic tenancies, because they figure it’s a desirable-enough area they can be picky about it.
Anyway. We get back to them at the start of January saying we’d like to renew the lease. The agent appears to be having trouble getting hold of the owner, or getting him to tell her what he wants, or something. She’s sufficiently professional to be stonewalling us pretty effectively.
In any event we’re now in a position where we have two weeks to negotiate a new lease, probably including a rent increase, with no idea how big an increase that is likely to be, and if we don’t have that new lease sorted we are legally required to leave.
So if it comes down to it, we could easily be in the position of having to choose between becoming homeless or paying a rather large rent increase.
If we don’t have anything useful from the agent by close of business today we pretty much have to assume that we’re going to have to move, and start hunting again in earnest. Finding a new home and moving in the space of two or three weeks in the current rental market is not a happy thought.
Update: the agent finally got back to me. She’s been leaving messages for the owner, who has thus far not been responsive. She doesn’t think there’ll be any problem getting the lease renewed, expects there will be a rent increase — that’s happening everywhere at the moment — and while she claims to sympathise re: the probable extremely short notice on rent increase prior to end of the lease “that’s why we asked you to decide two months ago”.
Unless the increase is in the three-figure area I suspect we’re going to have to just put up with it. This will hopefully be our last rental lease before we buy, and I suppose we will at least have lots of time to look for our new place over the coming year.
Popularity: 72% [?]
We’ve had a bit of a change in circumstance, such that we expect to be able to buy our own house in the next six months or so. We could, in theory, even do it in a few weeks, but this is important enough to be worth doing carefully.
We’re gradually settling on Sunbury and Werribee as the places we need to be looking first. Both are ~40 minutes by train from the Melbourne CBD, and both have houses and villa units with 2-3 bedrooms within our range reasonably near the station and other facilities.
Sunbury seems to be winning at the moment, as we spent a fair bit of time researching it for rental options a few months ago and there are a lot of two-bedroom villas in the ~$200k area, and a reasonable number of 3-bedroom places if we’re willing to walk up to 1.5km to get to town. There are also 3+ bedroom houses closer in around ~$300k, which is something we could consider moving up to in five to ten years once there’s enough equity in the first property.
But we haven’t visited either yet and it’ll be a while before we’re ready to do more than simply research options. Werribee may well make something of a comeback.
Anything closer in is pretty much unaffordable if you don’t drive, and the eastern-fringe suburbs where we could afford to buy near a station are an hour or more by train. Almost all the new development areas have no real public transport, if you’re lucky you get one bus route that stops at 3PM. Caroline Springs is a prime example: it could be a pretty reasonable place to live if only it had viable public transport!
But a place like Werribee or Sunbury seems to have much of what you need within a few kilometres, so the worst-case scenario is the occasional short-ish taxi ride so long as you get somewhere close enough to shops, station, and school.
Popularity: 73% [?]
The single most useful additional feature any real-estate listings site could add, in my opinion, would be compulsory “distance to x” data. We’d want x to be things like railway stations, tram stops, and supermarkets, but I can see that other people might want freeways and schools.
The problem as always isn’t with technical implementation, it’s with getting agents to find and then enter that sort of data. It’s not difficult to figure out — given an address and knowledge of the area you can get the distance out of Google Maps pretty quickly — but we’re talking here about people who often can’t be bothered even including more than one photo of a property.
Those agents who do include some information in the text typically put it in terms of “minutes”. Which usually means “by car”. So “close to shops, schools and station” can be anything up to five kilometres away. At least having it expressed in distance rather than trip-length would be unambiguous and useful to everyone.
Popularity: 84% [?]