7 June
Someone was talking about this restaurant they’d been to. It’s a bit posh so I won’t be going there any time soon, but boy, the website is well done! Excellent use of Flash, full of Dynamic Attention Captivators, congrats to the designers.
FYI - I just invented that term, it doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet, consider this prior art!
I posted some months ago about how I’d automated most of my bills. Most of them, except for these :
SA Water - check their website. They proudly offer a dozen different methods of payment, but EVERY single one requires manual intervention. They even went to the trouble of setting up their own online payment portal, but you can still only pay one bill at a time, manually. What a waste of their money. I can do that via my bank’s BPAY anyway! SA Water, shame on you. Look at Telstra or AGL for how to build a payment portal that lets you pay bills automatically.
AAMI They do let you set up direct debit payments, but only monthly. You can’t automate the annual insurance payment. And unfortunately their monthly rate is more expensive, and enough so that I just can’t justify it. AAMI, shame on you. Follow the lead of other insurance providers and make your direct-debit monthly rate exactly 1/12th of the annual rate. Why on earth wouldn’t you encourage automatic payments? It’s a win-win for you and the customer.
Note : This is not a comment on any other aspects of these businesses, which I am generally happy with, merely their bill payment facilities.
Thinking of registering your own domain name in Australia?
NetRegistry can give you your own :
.org.au domain = $13.75 for 2 years
.id.au domain = $29.95 for 2 years
.net.au domain = $44.95 for 2 years
Whatever you do, DO NOT, repeat DO NOT use Melbourne IT. Since they lost their domain monopoly in Australia some years ago they’ve completely lost the plot. At Melbourne IT now the above choices would set you back $88, $99 and $140 respectively!
I’m glad I moved all my domains to NetRegistry some time ago.
My day in the life of Urban Dead.
I lowered the battered duffel bag outside and climbed after it. Someone closed the window behind me, and I felt the scrape of furniture being placed against it. Crouched in the shadow of the Cheeke Building in the gathering darkness I stared intently at each black object on the street. Fourteen rotting bodies. None moved. But the noise of my exit would… there! A foot twitched. I raced around the corner, and almost collided with a hulking shape.
Instinct took over, and the shotgun fired, blasting the monster to the ground. My senses whirled. There were two of them! The shotgun roared again. A third body lay on the ground. A human! Still alive.. barely. I emptied the contents of my bag beside him, and snatched up another shotgun. I pumped another shell into each of the twitching zombies, and then knelt beside the human survivor. It took me five first aid kits to patch him up. Worth it though… he was a ranked survivor. I counted ten or twelve badges and insignia on his army jacket, many like the thirteen I bore. I saw a tattered name tag. Ring…something. He’d clearly been through just as much of this hell as I, but he’d done it the hard way, guarding the streets while I learnt my healing skills hiding in the hospitals. Street commandos like him had saved me those times I’d been caught out, helpless, zombies gnawing at my flesh.
But now, I had guns. Now I could use them, and now it was my turn to save. His wounds stemmed, I turned to the lurching zombies who were almost upon us, and unloaded my third shotgun on them. As they staggered upright once more, I switched to pistols firing clip after clip after clip, ten, fifteen, twenty shots, the echoes ringing around the alley. They swayed on their feet, rotting flesh hanging, shredded muscles barely able to function. Taking my time now, I lined up, and put a single bullet through each of their heads.
All those shots. Those zombies in the street would be moving now. It was time to go. I grabbed my duffel, stuffing weapons and kits inside, scanned the streets, and ran. I needed a new hideout, and I needed to find it now.
I wanted to find out the age of a venerable dignitary visiting our city, and once again Google just knew : “Donald Rumsfeld’s age”
How cool is that??
I bet it won’t be long before Google knows all the deeper darker secrets…
Struck with a bit of grammar uncertainty after the last post, I asked Google.
Results 1 - 10 of about 13,900,000 for it’s tongue. (0.21 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 22,100,000 for its tongue. (0.29 seconds)
And Google is right… according to :
http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000227.htm
You’ve got to wonder why the results are so close though. I mean, even if you strike out all the sentences of the form “what’s for dinner Mum? It’s tongue!” there’s still a good ten million mistakes out there. Ugh.
People - just ask Google, and stop polluting its results!
Ever wondered … what if Dr Seuss and Edgar Alan Poe had got together to sink a few ales?
Tonight I set up some automated transfers in net banking, and also registered at www.telstra.com and www.agl.com.au. Now every single one of my regular bills has an automated payment.
Overdue bills have long been the bane of my existence. While I’ve become more organised with bills in recent months, it’s still frustrating when one slips through, because I’ve found most companies follow this bill resolution script to remind customers about a bill :
1. If customer has no phone number, despite providing an email address and postal address, go straight to step 3, do not pass GO.
2. If customer can’t come to phone, refuse to explain the reason for the call to the person answering. Go to step 3.
3. Customer marked as “uncontactable” and kicked over to Debt Recovery.
I realise I can get people authorised to act on my behalf over the phone. I’ve tried this before in the past - the process is not pleasant, and sometimes they lose the authority record, or it expires after so many months or years.
It’ll be interesting to see whether automating all the bills will help - I suspect there’s a chance a failed transfer will escape my attention, and I won’t discover it till the bill is well overdue. I think the last missing step is for an automated email or SMS service attached to your netbanking… something to email you or text you with the information that “Transfer X of $Y to ABC has failed/succeeded”.
Was trying to remember the title of a great sci-fi story I read many many years ago. I googled and googled but came up with nothing, so I put my question to the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup.
The story goes that in the far future computers are processing the
votes to install a new government for the planet (or galaxy). Using
advanced algorithms the computers have been able to predict all the
billions of votes, so that it all comes down to the actual vote of one
single man… the story follows this man during the day as he makes his
momentuous decision.
Literally within minutes, the answer came back : Asimov’s “Franchise”. I love the internet!
Surprisingly though, I haven’t been able to find the full text of this story online (keywords : Asimov Franchise Muller Multivac). It was written in the early 1950s and I thought the copyright period was 50 years. Hmmm … I just found an old comment in alt.books.isaac-asimov : Somewhere between 2042 and 2067 — depending on where you live — all of Asimov’s copyrights will expire and all his work will be up for grabs. It will be in the public domain then and no longer under copyright.
D’oh! No wonder Project Gutenberg didn’t have ANY of his works.
I’ve no idea what this is all about.. guess I’ll find out soon.
Edit : Looks like I’m already clawing my way up to the upper echelon of A-list bloggers.
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