Memory Lark
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Leave The Car At Home Day
... which was today, has come and gone. I noticed only marginally less traffic than normal (if at all) and decided that someone needs a reality check. The idea is to promote health by asking people to walk. It wasn't pre-promoted all that well, first I heard about it was on the radio in the car on the way to work...
And it's definitely ditzy and impractical...
Example: I live 12km as the crow flies, or 15km by road, from where I work. Yeah sure I'll leave the car at home, start out for work at 2AM and get home by 9PM... I'm sure everyone else in Perth would also do this, yeah sure...
I've also tried using what laughably passes for "public transport" in this fair city. The bus route must be 16km at the very least with all the zigging and zagging to cover as much territory per route, and they stop about seven times as often as I do when driving to work. It takes me 15 minutes on a good day, 25 on a really bad, slow traffic day. I tried the bus the other day. 35 minutes later I arrived at the busport, waited another 10 minutes for a connecting bus, then another almost 10 minutes to get from there to my workplace. And that was the fastest route...
Train? Don't make me laugh. My nearest train station is 12 minutes away by car, then takes 20 minutes to get to the city, then I have another two or three kilomtere hike (depending on which station I stop at) to walk to work. Connecting buses? Oh yes, walk 5 minutes to the stop, wait 10 for a bus, then sit in it 5 - 10 minutes while it meanders all over the place and finally deposits me about 2/3 of the way towards work, leaving me almost a kilometre to walk anyway. Or get on one of the "CAT" intracity buses, then it goes the LONG way round its route and finally drops me about 200 metres from work. But takes 15 minutes to get there...
And our government wonders why we stick so doggedly to cars.
Oh - and using eco-friendly transport? I can't cycle - emphysema tends to do that to you - and I've looked at electric and hybrid vehicles. Who can afford them? Hell I am one of those people who buy a $2000 old smokey banger because I can't afford to hock my life for a new emission-controlled vehicle, give me a break okay? So until there are incentives to lose the smokers and go with the sparkies, I would very much like to drive a new Prius or some such greener vehicle but can't. I'd love to get on a bus or better yet a train every morning and go to work in a reasonable amount of time, but it's not possible yet.
Ask yourself why nothing gets done about this. "Hmm" says the government, "we could spend a few billion on better transport and providing incentives to make, import, and buy green vehicles - but the disasters that are happening now won't come home to roost for another 10 years. And not doing this now makes our figures look better..."
I REALLY don't want to be alive when those chickens come home to roost...
Something I really like?
http://atanks.sourceforge.net/Something I really like is the old classic Scorched Earth, but for years, PCs had become too fast for the old unclocked DOS battler, and I'd given it away as a bad joke. (They recently released a version of Scorch that didn't need one to run SloMo but I can't find the URL.) So when I saw Atomic Tanks I just had to download it. Verdict? Cool!
e3 :: blogging the wireless freenet
http : // e3 . com . au /
e3 :: blogging the wireless freenet are a wireless freenet in Perth, Western Australia. I plan to provide some linkage to this network, by way of letting them piggyback on my wireless link to work. Always assuming the wifi to work becomes a reality. Man it's difficult to get spare time to do stuff!
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
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