John Mee – Some programmer in Sydney

My brother has just started riding his bike to work… in San Francisco.

• The Sausalito Ferry carries about 40,000 passengers a month according to the Report of the General Manager

Sausalito Ferry Bike Room


• The Manly Ferry carries about 470,000 passengers a month I’m guessing from this fact sheet.

  The Manly Ferry Bike Rack
  

The mind boggles. Am I getting this right..?

TEN TIMES THE DEMAND!!

Compare those facilities again.
This is what you want… this what you get… this is what you want… this is what you get…

Now don’t tell that the Sydney CBD is so not-bicycle-friendly that there’s no point in taking it with you. That kind of thinking is exactly the problem. How far you can get from the Quay with a bicycle? An office near Town Hall, Surry Hills, Ultimo, or Pyrmont? Central Station for the Blue Mountains? Darlinghurst for fashion? Kings Cross for a night out? Newtown for freaks? Uni of Sydney or UNSW? Should I continue?

Everyone knows its faster to walk up George St in peak hour than sit on a bus. Mmm… bike?

Are you dreaming of a day when an old lady can roll down to the ferry, sit admiring the harbour with her knitting, then perhaps cruise the botanic gardens, or power up to Newtown for tea with her good friend Betty? I know I am

A flick through minutes of the Ferry Passengers Advisory Committee it looks like they actively encourage people to ride to the ferry. Sydney Ferries are more likely discourage it simply because they can’t cope with the demand?! Can I roll my eye’s now please?

Thanks Andrew for the photo as I don’t actually take the ferry with my bike. I can ride there in about the same time and earn some chocolate. I agree its not nearly as peaceful; but I do like chocolate.

Walking down Manly corso – “Hey mate, can you tell me how far it is to Melbourne?”
Never one for a straight answer – “Well probably a bit far to walk”.

We get to talking. He not looking for directions for Melbourne as much as directions for life:

James is touristing the world for a month. He’s not drunk, not mental, not miserable, quite normal. His wife has recently left him. He is escaping a cocaine addiction. But he, just today, on the beach of Manly, has come to the conclusion that he is hopelessly miserable. He’s tried booze, drug, prostitutes. Nothing fulfills him. He needs a change. A life saving change. He’s negative. He’s 38, and he doesn’t want to die; well, not just yet. But he knows that is the path he is on: more drugs, more bad health, more misery, death.

We chat. He needs to turn his life around. He wants to turn his life around. He wants to think positive. His eyes brighten as we envisage positives. He gains hope. He wants life. Invite Jesus into his life. I encourage him to research the man: did he really exist? who did he say he was? who do you think he was?

Nothing is a coincidence. Thanks God for my little part in your play of James’ life. Fill and strengthen him with your spirit. See that he joins with us in your heaven.

Quick note to self and others having just wasted several hours trying to get Yahoo’s YUI calendar to work with dates in the format “2008-06-19″.

Working from this example I was only setting the “DATE_FIELD_DELIMITER”. It refused to work, but I struggled on confident that, for once, the americans really had implemented something which wasn’t culturally imperialistic.

Finally I’ve worked out that the “DATE_RANGE_DELIMITER” is already “-” and setting the “DATE_FIELD_DELIMITER” will not override that setting. It will continue parse your date as a range.

eg: So to use dates in yyyy-m-d format change the “DATE_RANGE_DELIMITER” to something else…

var call = new YAHOO.widget.Calendar("calendar");
call.cfg.setProperty("DATE_RANGE_DELIMITER", "+");
call.cfg.setProperty("DATE_FIELD_DELIMITER", "-");
call.cfg.setProperty("MDY_YEAR_POSITION", 1);
call.cfg.setProperty("MDY_MONTH_POSITION", 2);
call.cfg.setProperty("MDY_DAY_POSITION", 3);
call.select("2008-6-21");
call.render();


If you expect it to open at the selected day then don’t run away, there’s more…

The “pagedate” property only wants the month and the year; it can’t handle being fed the date you’ve just used, which is rather irritating. It not only wants you to trim the day off but also tell it the order of month/day strings (as opposed to month/day/year strings). It all starts to add up to lots of code…


call.cfg.setProperty("MY_YEAR_POSITION", 1);
call.cfg.setProperty("MY_MONTH_POSITION", 2);
call.cfg.setProperty("pagedate","2008-06");


No joy. I listed my item for 10 days and didn’t get a bid.

Just for comparison I’ve relisted the item exactly the same – words, photos, conditions, duration, pricing, everything onto ebay. Sold on day 3. Its a great relief to get a bid and know that it is gone, done, dusted.

My ebay ad for a graphics card.

In fact I’ve been amazed what I’ve been able to sell on ebay over the years. Just for a joke/experiment once I listed “metallic rubbish” – it was the case of desktop pc, nothing in it i don’t think, perhaps a dud motherboard. Someone bought it. The only time an item has not sold was when I put a ridiculous ‘buyitnow’ price on something I’d gone to a lot of trouble to import. I said if you want to pay this much then you can have it. There were quite a few watchers but no-one wanted it that badly.

Looks my $10 with oztion will be there for quite a while.

I’ve been a member of ebay since January 2001!

I’m finding myself joining the chorus of people getting a little disgruntled about them. The fees used to be nice and trivial, but now they’re starting to get significant. The latest move to force everyone to use paypal has raised some eyebrows. The tipping point for me has been a change in the selling models.

It used to be, and I think it still is on the USA site, that you could run an auction and place a ‘BuyItNow’ price as a sort of carrot to bidders who didn’t want to miss out or bother with the bidding. I rarely use it, but tried to a couple of days ago and they’ve changed it such that as soon as anyone places a bid then the BuyNow price disappears. I wasn’t aware of this change and placed my ad then wondered what happened to the buynow. I got someone on “LiveHelp” but I couldn’t get them to make any comment at all on this change so I wound up canceling the auction.

I figured I’d try Oztion.com.au – the aussie alternative. It wasn’t too hard to get registered; although I had to cough up $10 for ‘initial credit’ I was up inside 15 minutes. The ads are free there’s a Final Value Fee. All the ebay functionality is there so I listed.

I host the images at this site, so I get to see the level of interest. Three days later I’m a little appalled. Two or three people have seen the ad; on ebay that would be around 40 or 50.

Most items on Oztion are BuyNow. There are very few auctions. No doubt because auctions don’t really present good value to sellers if there is only one buyer.

Nonetheless I’ll stick with them for a bit longer. I dropped the price of the item and changed to an auction with a high, but good value, initial bid. See how we go. Hope I don’t have to go back to ebay to get rid of the thing.

http://www.oztion.com.au/buy/auction.aspx?itemid=4180255

One thing of note: oztion had a little facebook link. It posted the listing to my facebook “Feed” I’ve had about 10-15 hits from the feed… vastly more than the oztion site itself. Just curious friends, however, rather than genuine buyers.

Sizable. High Tide at 10am. Pressure to go before the wind gets into it. Didn’t count but possibly 100 in the water for the dawn session. Went but got nothing without four or five friends. Cut it short till crowd/tide drops.

Yesterday on the other hand was fantastic. Surfed till after dark in smooth low tide 6ft east swell. Got a lot of great waves from the main peak and surfed them well enough to draw compliments

Today’s grand triumph seemed like such an elementary question that I was hesitant to even call the tax office. Merely asking such a question would immediately reveal I’m way out of my league and thus the Tax Police would come breaking down my door. I dialled 13 28 66 the ATO business tax help line (again) and navigated the autoprompts; got a person…

Me:
Um, hi, Company Tax, Question 6 – the Profit and Loss report – Where do I put the Salary/Wages expenses?”

Now Salary and Wages are a significant chunk of any company’s profit and loss statement, or so I thought, so it should be fairly prominent. But between the available options and the handbook the only instructions I could find were where not to put it. “Cost Of Sales” was my best guess but, really, it does look like they expect, well, the cost of sales in there?!

ATO Employee 1:
Oh. Um. Gee. Er. I don’t know. Um, Let me put you through to an expert in that field…

ATO Employee 2:
Oh, gee, let me see now. Well that would be an expense, right? Um, … Can I put you on hold?
Hello? Can I put you through to my supervisor?

ATO Employee 3:
Hello? Add it to Item “S” – ‘All Other Expenses’

27 minutes later, well yes obviously this big ticket item is lumped unceremoniously amongst all the other miscellaneous expenses at the bottom I sarcastically mused to myself.

The list of such questions grows faster than the list of forms they demand of me…

1. Annual PAYG Summary Advice
2. Quarterly PAYG Installment Notice
3. Annual GST Activity Statement
4. Company Tax Return
5. Individuals Tax Return
6. with supplementary section
7. and business and professional items schedule
8. and I’m still not sure whether I/they want the Personal Services Income Schedule?

All this for the privilege of sending them around 40 cents of every dollar I see! Well, yes, I know I drew both Austudy and the Dole in my younger days but is this really a fair way to punish a guy?! Tell you what, if I can’t get the pension I’ll be sore

I’m glued to the surf today. Raw action is “streaming live” into my room here and its perfectly captivating. It’s well over six foot out there and my eyes are fixed into the binocular cups following the fames and fortunes of some big men and small boys. I’m so keen to share it that I’m not only ebaying for better binoculars I’m dreaming of the ‘bower’ website which will bring it all to you! Live feed, telephoto stills, surfer profiles.

My current camera (Nikon L3) doesn’t want to talk to my computer now. Orded a Canon IXUS70 from dinosaur deals today.

Manly Hydraulic Labs are calling it 3 meters of North East swell.