Train service sucks!

Yeah,

I've had enough. Time to tell it like it is. How ridiculous is the rail service? If a train is a little late, which it often it, then it gets cancelled. Yeah, we can all wait until the next one which we often do, and whilst that isn't going to affect our lives so badly, a packed uncomfortable stuffy train does.

And anyway, we pay for a service, so there should be a penalty for the rail companies if they're late, so dissuade them from continually cancelling trains. If that doesn't happen, then what motivate have they for an efficient service? You already paid for the ticket, so why not cancel? If commuters got a small amount of money for the x number of times that the train was cancelled of late, then that would eat into their profits, so efficiency would them once more be a priority.

Enough is enough, sort your stuff out!

All things Software has moved!

All things software has now moved to a different blog location.

Find it here

I hope you continue to enjoy the information that it provides.

Martin.

Politics - What the??

Well, here I am talking politics, kind of. I can't believe I'm going to do it, so please go easy on me!

I see the political figures when coming up to an election appear to want to uncover skeletons in the closets of their rivals. I don't understand how or why this happens, or how they can get away with it. These people will be elected, and asked to run a country, and all they demonstrate before is how they can tell tales. Come on people, this isn't school, you know.

Is it really newsworthy, or make any sort of a difference if a politician tried drugs, or got drunk in the past, or had any sort of a life like the rest of us? Actually, I think it does. Those politicians would be more likely to be able to identify with normal people, wouldn't they?

Obviously, whilst in power the politician should not be drinking or taking drugs so that it has an effect on the decisions that they make. If the politicians have done it in the past, does it matter if they no longer do? Again, I actually think it does. A politician is more able to understand issues if they have some experience around what other people have seen or done, don't you think?

There seems to be a bit of a problem, raking up people's past leading up to an election seems a waste of energy. On the other hand, question a politicians' political past would be very useful. "Why did you do do that?", and "What did you learn" would surely be more important than whether that politician promises to do this that and the other. I mean, promises can often be empty, whereas if we know about the mistakes and therefore learnings of a politician we may better be able to judge where they're coming form, and what is really important to them, instead of being a case of just making the right noises.

Perhaps we should start to look at politicians in the same way as we do stocks in the stock market? There's the fundamentals, the financials returns of the past, whether the management has been truthful, and held the people they represent in high regard. does the returns on investment outweight the risk involved?
Can we do technical analysis on the politician, look at the trends and patterns of past performance? Be able to predict what they're likely to do in the future? It's worth a thought isn't it?
Perhaps then, when the politicians start to rake up all this so called important information, that would detract from their bottom line due to the wasted energy, and we'd eliminate the snitches!

It's novel, but do you think that we could set up a political stock market, and only then pick stocks based on performance rather than connections, empty promises and what they manage to uncover about the opposition? Kind of seems like a cool idea to me?

Blogging the return, this time it's personal.

Hi,

Well, I thought that I'd give a little bit of feedback on how blogging is going.

I have to admit, I quite enjoy doing it. It's something creative that I didn't expect would be my sort of thing. It's like writing in a diary, and sharing it with only your closest friends, the internet.

I recently changed my blogs around a little, since I originally started with one blog, and that's grown now to four blogs. I arranged them, so that they're stored in a more logical manner, that will hopefully make for easier to locate content for the future.

I can't say that all this effort has made me lots of money, in fact so far I think it's made me the tidy sum of $0.00. Perhaps now that I've got my house in order, and have the blogs logically sorted, people will start to visit, and I will see an improvement from those heady heights. Let's face it, I can only improve from here on in.

It looks like an easy thing to do, does blogging, but even if you do have strong opinions, and can write reasonably, it's still quite tough. Well, when I say that, I mean it's quite tough to blog, and get people to visit, and stay with you. Many people just look on their way through, or use things like StumbleUpon to get to the site. Those people then obviously are not taken by the content and spend only a couple of second there before leaving. Hi!!

You really have to know the sorts of words to leave as a headline to grab people's attention, then the content has to be absorbing. Then you need to come up with that sort of quality and content on a regular basis. Your reader base will grow, and you will become rich, good looking, have a fancy sports car, large yacht, bit house, you know the deal. Actually, I made that up.

Then there's a myriad of different way to generate readers, to get people to view site. Thought communities like BlogCatalog, which incidentally is great, and has some very helpful members, or StumbleUpon or various widget offerings. Widgets are little windows that offer up pictures of who visited your site, links to other sites, things for sale, that sort of thing. The jury is out as to whether they're useful or not.

One thing they do, is make the page load time of the blog seem quick, because of how slow it them becomes after having 2 or 3 widgets on the page. There is a good reason for this, they're using JavaScript mostly, and are querying some other site for their data. I don't know if people close the blog if it takes too long to load, as there aren't any counters for that, that I've seen so far!

MLM companies and making money.

Hi,

Yesterday I attended a presentation about a well known MLM company.

Really, it's amazing how well they sell that stuff. I knew that it wasn't the sort of thing that I'd want to do, due to having to be a pushy salesman to make any money from it, if indeed you did make any money from it.

They're so good at convincing you that the choice is simple, a no brainer really, and that you have nothing to lose to join up.

It's only when you think about it, and this about how they make their money that you realise how wrong it all really is. They have some products that they sell to you, and they also have some education systems that they also sell to you. This is where the real money is made for those that started the business. They get the money from the educational materials, whilst making you believe that you will get your friends to do the work, and you will get the rewards, for doing very little really.

They mention the very things that are such hot topics for so many people. How to make money whilst still keeping your job, and with it costing you only something around the price of a pair of shoes (whose shoes?!!) Then there's that whole idea of introducing other people, and them earning you some benefit or other.

It sounds to good to be true doesn't it? Then it probably is.

I asked questions about where the money is made, which was met with answer avoidance tactics. I asked about how much money you save by buying products, and was met with the same tactic. A product has to be good to sell, if these products are so good, why does nobody want to share those great features with you, and instead sell it on a promise and hot air?!

The things that I don't like is that this sort of a process prays on the gullible, or those who most want to get out of debt.

As with anything you need to look at the total cost of doing this thing. It costs to join, and set up a business, it costs for the educational materials, it costs to attend the various gatherings. But how much does it cost, and can you reasonably expect to make more money than you spend? Will this revolutionary idea that seems to have been around forever be any different from just starting a business, if you start the right business?

I'm personally all for the idea of having many people involved in a successful business. Many different views added together can make for a great dynamic. Ideas can bounce around, and the business is much more likely to be rounded, and multi-skilled. However, if those multiple heads involved in your business as their only to make money out of you, and ultimately take the money you earn from you, that seems to completely negate any benefit that might have originally been seen.

The top and bottom of it is, you never get a free lunch, if it seems to be too good to be true, then it probably is. I decided not to go any further with the process once I figured out how it all works.

Using iPods to view text / read pdf eBooks

Hi,

Well, the title says it all really.

I'm very impressed with the ability of my iPod to read text notes, by converting a PDF into text. Then, you upload it to Convert books into iPod notes.

Finally, you extract the data that you download from the above site. I extracted it to the name of the book.

Then to make locating the books easier, I copy the folder and it's contents to the Notes folder on the iPod.

It's really cool, and very useful to read something whilst commuting, without having to carry a heavy book around. I love it, do you?

Martin.

Broadband woes

Hello there readers,

Well, I thought that I'd start with a whinge. Typical, I hear you say, always whinging. Sorry, but this is an important one to me. I don't want to get in trouble for telling you all, but tell you I will, since there seems to be nothing else that I can do.

We have been in our house since May 2006, and still can't get broadband access speeds to the house. Last I looked, the house wasn't a cave. And yet, here I am with a pair gain telephone system. What is next Telstra, are we to get morse code sets, so that you can cut your costs further?

I wasn't made aware that I was getting a pair gain line into the house (I didn't even know that such a thing existed), nor was I asked if I would like a connection speed that goes faster than 28Kbps, but here I am, in this very situation.
We live in a house 12Km from the city, for all you snobs out there, we'd probably not be considered inner city. All the same, it's a long way from rural, or out in the sticks as we like to call it. We live in a reasonably nice area, our house is only about 7 years old, and yet we have a pedal powered telecommunications system from hell.

The house is in a lovely location, with a nature reserve behind us, and a park in front. That idyllic (!) setting isn't a good setting to be in if you want to get wireless connectivity. Wireless carriers don't seem to want to transmit through trees, which makes out situation that little bit more hopeless.

Finally, we think that we'd like to try for cable access, no such luck. 5-10 minutes walk through the park and people I know have it, but we can't get it.
How is this customer service, helpful, or anything but a monopoly? We have nowhere to go, to get better access. There is no hope in my opinion of that changing either, as competitors are at our local exchange, so Telstra, one would imagine would have no motivation to allow their competitors to compete.

One final note, to try to get the line transpositioned, you have to apply for Telstra braodband through bigpond. That really does seem to me like a great offer dressed up a little like a monopoly?

I have tried other phone companies, some take the time to tell me that there is nothing that they can do, and Telstra would charge them a lot of money to upgrade the line if they did it at all. And some act almost as if I have the plague or something, and can't wait to hang up on me.

I've tried the wireless option, which due to the trees means that I had to force the modem to work at its top speed, which resulted in frequent and long disconnections, often resulting in my having to restart the modem. The only option I can think of is to install an aerial, but I won't do that unless I can guarantee a decent reception, and good service. So many wireless providers are soooo expensive, and I need some decent amounts of download and upload limits, since I actually work in software. Okay, I don't work in software, I design, and write software, and being able to upload, download, get the latest beta releases of software and so on would be great.

Here's a thought, if there's anyone from Microsoft reading this post, please complain very strongly about this issue, since I can't help you test software, or write applications for it because it would take from now to eternity to download the software on a flaky 28Kbps connection. Please?

So what's happening then? Well, it seems quite obvious to me that the problems are down to a lack of competition, nay, no competition at all. There is no alternative infrastructure available, so competitors can't ever be that. This infrastructure was originally government owned, so really should belong to the people. One solution to this woeful tale is to split the company, to make an infrastructure company, and one that uses those services to sell other products. If that happened, then all competitors would compete on a level playing field, and force the technology to be improved.

I hear murmurings of future developments into WiMax and those sorts of areas. I hope that this technology isn't tree-adverse too, otherwise maybe we will still have the line when it becomes and antique. I wonder if we could then claim squatters' rights on the line?!

I've been in contact with Telstra, senators, ombudsman, the monopolies commission, and guess what, nobody wants to know, or cares. Perhaps somebody will read this, and contact me with some ideas. There must be companies out there that can do something, make some money, and solve my problems all in one kind act?

The thing you were looking for has moved.

Hi!

Yeah, you're not kidding. All that loverly information has moved.

I'm sorry, but I thought that it was better to move it now, and make the blogs more logical before it all gets too difficult.

So the new location is All things software

I hope that this doesn't cause too much hurt, but if it does, by all means leave a comment, and tell me what a thoughtless pain I really am!!!

Thank you for your patience,

Martin.