(actually, I didn’t say that last bit, I only thought it. It was still good though.)

Similarly, Silicon Valley doesn’t actually need a physical manifestation. Just the concept is enough. And yet, here I am, going to an organic coffee bar hearing a live acoustic band with lots of long-haired laid back californians … who are wearing eBay t-shirts and texting on their Blackberry. Or checking email on their macbook. Or playing with their new iPhone. The biggest peril I face every morning is getting on the right employee shuttle bus. A mistake might accidentally result in me ending up not at Google, but at Yahoo!, or eBay, or Microsoft, or LinkedIn, or… you get the idea. Inicidentally, these companies are also things that don’t need to exist. I mean, we all use Google, or eBay, or LinkedIn, but the thought of them having massive office buildings, all near each other, with busloads of brilliant college graduates commuting every day to work there … well, why can’t I just stick to my nice fantasy that eBay is “just a website”?

Speaking of iPhones, there’s yet another thing that really doesn’t need a physical manifestation. The concept is so powerful that even had Apple never brought a single iPhone to market, people would be queueing to buy them. We all somehow *know* this thing is cool. (Just like we *know* that Apple’s marketing guys deserve an award. Or a long and painful death, depending on which angle you’re coming from. Regardless, they’re all geniuses, whoever they are.) And yet it exists, as if to insult you by saying “I don’t trust you to believe all our marketing, why don’t you just *try me* and see?”. And just because it is so very cool, and does in fact turn out to exist, I now own one.

Tourist Who Doesn’t Speak Much German: Ticket? Tram ticket? Need tram ticket?
“Helpful” Post Office Official: No, this is a post office. Can’t get tram tickets here.
Tourist: Ticket?
Postie: Nono, no tickets here, we send mail. Post. POST. POST.
Tourist: Post? Ticket?
Postie: Yes, POST! Not ticket. We make mail go Voom. VOOM. *hand waving to illustrate mail going voom*
Tourist: Ticket? *admits defeat and leaves*

At this point the postie turns to the lady at the next counter with a huge grin and a “well, tourists, what can you do” shrug. (She asks him “how did that go again? Voom?”)

…

At no point in this did it occur to anyone present to tell the poor tourist where she might actually obtain tickets.

THE toll from yesterday’s horrific Burnley Tunnel crash and inferno could rise above the three people confirmed dead, authorities have warned.

Police are seeking surveillance footage of the accident, which began in the tunnel just before 10am. They said it was not yet known how many people had been travelling in the cars destroyed in the carnage.

The tunnel could remain closed until Monday as investigators examine the scene and engineers assess it for structural damage, police said.

Explosions rocked the tunnel, motorists told of a huge wall of flames and temperatures soared above 1000 degrees. Police Assistant Commissioner Noel Ashby said some of the crash vehicles had turned into “balls of molten metal”. Investigators had still not identified the make of some of the cars.

In particular, I am driven to comment on CityLink’s response to the accident:

A motorist trapped in the tunnel, barrister Anthony Southall, QC, said the rescue effort was inadequate for those first frightening minutes when motorists were trying to walk out of the 3.4-kilometre tunnel unaided.

“There were no CityLink staff to direct us. In fact, there was a disabled lady in the car behind us and she needed some assistance.”

So what was CityLink doing?

CityLink spokeswoman Jean Ker Walsh said the initial accident had occurred very quickly, before a CityLink recovery vehicle could respond.

“We do know that immediately our lane closure system was activated. Regrettably, before an accident response team could get there, the incident occurred.”

“There are very strong practices to shut down a particular lane where necessary … it happened so instantaneously, emergency practices were just starting to occur when the second and third crashes occurred.”

Now, I don’t know if road engineers use the same buzzwords, but in the field of software engineering we make a distinction between ‘verification’ and ‘validation’ as types of testing. Verification testing checks that some process occurred as specified. Seems the “lane closure system” passed this test. Validation checks whether the process had the desired effect. Obviously this is the more difficult type of testing. And we also see that the “lane closure system” did not have the desired effect. So perhaps it would be more helpful to say “hmm, looks like we need better crash response procedures” than to say “well, our crash response procedures operated as designed, whoopeedoo!”.

He urged motorists to put the tragedy into perspective. “The tunnel’s been around a long time,” he said.

This one really gets me. A long time? Puh-leeze… the tunnel was opened in December 2000 – it’s just over 6 years old. CityLink have a contract with the government to operate the tunnel for 30 years [33 years and 6 months, in fact]- so the tunnel has just passed one fifth of its expected operating time. Tunnels that have been around a long time are:

• Kurikoyama tunnel, Japan (constructed 1880)
• Glenbrook railway tunnel, the Blue Mountains (constructed 1891-1892)
• Der Alte Elbtunnel, Hamburg, Germany (constructed 1907-1911).

I’d even give the honour to the San Bernardino Tunnel in Switzerland, constructed 1967. But 6 years?

At least they have some compassion:

CityLink also announced today that tolls would be waived for affected motorists yesterday.

I am the proud owner of a new 1Gb PC-4200 SODIMM. Currently my Powerbook contains 256Mb of RAM soldered onto the motherboard (wonderful design decision Apple, thankyou!), and a 256Mb PC-2700 SODIMM that I installed when I bought it.

I have now learnt (by bitter experience) that a PC-4200 SODIMM is not the same shape as a PC-2700 SODIMM. Oh, yes, they have the same, ahem, “form factor”, but the little slot in the PCB that aligns the pins with the motherboard is in a different place. Out by a good 3mm, I’d say. Not sure how “form factor” is defined, but it obviously doesn’t mean “specific enough to be able to buy RAM according to it”. I have since found an Apple document (down the ladder to the basement, with a torch, behind a sign saying “Beware of the leopard”) that says that 12″ Powerbook G4 (the 1.33GHz processor type, but without Gigabit ethernet – man, how many models are there??) takes PC-2700 RAM. I guess this implies, although doesn’t explicitly state, that PC-4200 RAM is not OK.

You may let your imagination run wild when imagining my frustration. I guess I shall just put this SODIMM back on eBay, and start bidding for another one…

In other news, today I went and joined the queue outside the Ausländerbehörde at 8am (opening time), and then waited inside for another hour, and then upon handing over and photocopying of the relevant papers, received my shiny new German Aufenthaltserlaubnis. Bureaucracy all complete! (Until I find an apartment, and need to move house of course…)

Oh look, how quaint, men knitting. Must be a club for all those Gays that I’ve read about to meet, they even have Avocado Moisturiser and other skin care products, how sweet for them! Oh, they have straight guys too. Must be the ones that haven’t come out yet! Heh heh heh. Let’s all have a chuckle and feel nice and superior cos at least WE’re normal. (But not like those stinky Rednecks, at least we’re open-minded enough to read about Gays-sorry-men knitting. And laught at them. Heh heh heh.)

So I’ve been using the Google personalised homepage (I think they call it “individualised”) for a while now… http://www.google.com/ig. And I only just discovered that sometime between the last time I checked and today, the weather module has been updated to include various international weather locations as well as the US (like, for example, Melbourne AU); and the “roll your own” module now lets you use a RSS feed, not just a Google search. Which is infinitely more useful, at least to me.

So now I’ve pretty much doubled the number of things on my Google homepage. Heh heh. Some of you may have heard my harebrained scheme for producing my own personalised newspaper with a few RSS aggregators, a bit of Google News’s parsing code, and an A1 printer… This homepage seems to be getting closer to that dream (without the A1 printer bit of course).

Screenshot:

You’ll notice, of course, that the weather, while being Australia’s weather, is still in American units. Feh.

Martin,

Good work on your plans!!! – Great ideas!!!

Now, wouldn’t it be nice if the government were to actually do some of that???

In my humble opinion, there are 6 items that could be improved with the current system, in addition to your ideas.

1. There are some extensions and additions planned for some of the outer suburbs. These have been promised by the government and they have either dropped or not finished them. They should be completed. =)
   • South Morang extension
   • Craigieburne extension – The track is there, as is Craigieburne station, it just needs a couple of stations (and trains of course)
   • Langwarrin station on the Stony Point line.
   • Cranbourne East station after Cranbourne.
2. On this subject, short extensions to the next suburb on some of the outer arms of the star would also be good:
   • Link the Upfield line up to the Broadmeadows line extension – the track is there, it just needs trains to run on it.
   • The Yarra Valley Tourist Railway could be used to extend the Lilydale line out to Healesville.
   • And use the Mornington Peninsular railway to extend the Stony Point line out to Mornington

   Basically, the idea with these is that they get:

   • Government funding to restore their infrastructure.
   • Validators / vendys for metcards.
   • Their share of the profits from the sale of these.
   • And timetabled platform space at Baxter/Frankston and Lilydale.

   In return they would run somewhere in the reigon of 4-6 trains a day over their tracks as commuter trains ticketed with Metcards. They’d also have the option of running their usual steam / whatever services whenever they want with their own tickets.

3. There probably should be a tram link to the airport too => tourists seeing the classic icon of Melbourne, it’s trams, immediately upon entering the city. (It’d have to be light rail to keep transit times down, maybe along the highway, and joining up with, or extending, the #59 on the Tullamarine Freeway.)
4. The Geelong line: (does this mean that Geelong is now part of Melbourne???) I think it should be extended from your plan to go out to the new Marshall station. (Via breakwater for the Geelong Cup =) ) Yay, one ticket to go from home in Melbourne to home in Geelong. Sadly it’ll cost about the same as it does now with V-Line. V-Line should run the Werribee-Marshall line with their new fast trains. (Basically, the same service they run now, but terminating at Marshall more often, accepting suburban passengers within the MET, and accepting Metcards for the journey, possibly with ticket machines / validators on the trains).

For the long term:

5. maybe a “zone 3″ linkup between the Frankstone line through Cranbourne and merging with the line to Pakenham at Officer, and a similar thing for the Belgrave line, through Belgrave south, and looping back to the city on the Pakenham line at Berwick.
6. Maybe also resurrect the South Gippsland Railway as an extension of the Cragieburne line.

Hmm, maybe I’m getting a little obsessive about this =)

Maybe I’m also putting too much thought into it =)

So, why not continue?

I have updated your big map with what I’ve described above. (points 1,
2, 4 in dark red, and 5 in orange) It’s 2.6 MB, so if you want it, email / talk to me. I’ve also attached an updated version of your train diagram with the new extensions and stations filled in

Have fun!

–

Julian Calaby

Here’s the pics to go with it… unfortunately the Healesville rail extension is off the edges of the Melways map that I produced: