Is This Thing On?

According to today’s The Age:

RISING living costs and a surging Australian dollar mean it is now more expensive to live in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth than in London, Vienna, Rome or New York.

A startling claim, I’m sure you’ll agree, but something doesn’t quite ring true for me about this. Why should a “surging Australian dollar” make it more expensive to live in an Australian city? A surging Australian dollar might make it expensive to visit an Australian city, but for anyone living there–earning a salary in the local currency–it should surely make the cost of living cheaper. Apart from anything else due to lower prices for imported goods.

So I downloaded the free report (from here) and of course the introduction makes clear that any conclusions you might draw from the report about the cost of living anywhere outside the US are somewhat flawed:

There are two major reasons why a city’s cost-of-living index will change over time: exchange rate movement and price movement. Since a common currency is required in making a comparative calculation, all local prices are converted into US dollars, which emphasises the role of currency
movement.

So, essentially, it’s not a cost of living survey at all. It’s a cost of visiting from the US and paying for things with US dollars survey.

Elsewhere in the introduction, we have this:

Of particular note is the rapid growth in the relative cost of living of Australian cities. Sydney and Melbourne are ranked sixth and seventh respectively and are closely followed by Perth and Brisbane in 13th and 14th place in the ranking. This is the culmination of a remarkable rise in the cost of living in Australian cities over the last decade, a period in which the value of the Australian dollar has moved from around 50 US cents to passing parity with the US dollar earlier this year.

Well yes of course, if you’re going to convert everything back into USD then it’s hardly surprising that if the Aussie goes from being worth 50 US cents to 1.07 USD that would make those Australian cities seem hugely more expensive, relative to the US. It doesn’t mean that those cities are actually that much more expensive for people who live and work there.

The article in The Age concludes with the following:

Melbourne was among the most expensive for a daily business trip at $US760 ($A711) a day – made up of one night’s hotel accommodation, two meals, two taxi trips, a daily newspaper and a drink at a bar. Sydney came in at $US627.

This I find truly baffling. Without subscribing to the detailed city information, I can’t get any more information about how these prices are broken down for Melbourne. All it tells me in the free report is that:

Daily business trip rate consists of one night’s accommodation in a hotel, one two-course meal, one simple meal, two 5km journeys by taxi, one drink in the hotel bar and one international foreign daily newspaper.

Ok, so let’s be generous and assume that the hotel costs you $300 (that’d get you into almost any of the 4/5* major CBD hotels), and let’s allocate $200 to the meals (this is for one person, remember…) The 5km taxi rides shouldn’t cost more than $15 each and even the most expensive hotel bar will probably serve you a drink for under twenty bucks.

Even staying at a top hotel and eating very well, I can’t get much above $550. Where’s the rest of that cost coming from? Unless it costs $150 to buy a “foreign daily newspaper”, it just doesn’t add up.

*

Of course despite the name this isn’t really a cost of living survey at all, as the report itself makes clear:

The Worldwide Cost of Living survey enables human resources line managers and expatriate executives to compare the cost of living in 140 cities in 93 countries and calculate fair compensation policies for relocating employees.

Which is fine and all, but maybe our newspapers shouldn’t just be blindly reporting on it as an example of how expensive our city is without making that clear…

Funny. Only the other day I was reading an interview in the weekend paper with the host of Channel Ten’s long running weekend morning music video show, Video Hits, which mentioned how profitable it is for the network:

At Ten, Video Hits is seen almost as part of the furniture, having been on-air in various guises for 25 years.

“It’s one of the most profitable shows on the network”, she says.

[The Age Life And Style, July 2, 2011]

Two days later, up pops new Ten CEO Lachlan Murdoch to cancel it.

It seems an odd decision to me, as surely it must have been a relatively cheap way of filling a lot of airtime. I wonder where the nation’s viewers will have to turn now to get their fix of music videos and sport.

Oh. That.

Even odder, though, is this quote at the end of that article from The Australian:

Mr Murdoch, who flagged the cuts earlier this year, blamed rising costs in news, the multi-channel Eleven and Ten’s hit show MasterChef Australia.

Quite. Having the single most successful reality ratings juggernaut on your books (which must surely pull in significant sponsorship revenue if the incessant product placement is anything to go by) must be such a burden. I’m sure the other free-to-air networks–who have been relentlessly throwing their own imitations at the TV wall in an attempt to make one stick–must feel your pain.

I’ve written before about some of the random emails I get from time to time that were supposed to go to a different Matt (we really need a word to describe this phenomenon; “spam” just doesn’t quite cut it), but I was reminded recently that I never actually posted my all time favourite.

This one was apparently successfully sent to its original recipient, who then tried to forward it on to someone she knew called Matt.

I have no other comments to make that can possibly do justice to this, so I will simply reproduce the email in full below–typos and incorrect “yours” and all.

Enjoy…

Date: Nov 3, 2010
Subject: Sweet, Loving Email
From: Estefania
To: Matt

———- Forwarded message ———-

Stephenie,

Lets get a few things straight about this past weekend. I was going to wait and give you the chance to reach out to Lauren and I. Clearly it was foolish to think you would try and make this right or work this out. Your actions and total lack of respect makes this easy.

First, you did lie about what you did in our bed and it is a big deal. Having sex in someones bed without their permission or them even knowing about it is not right and not respectful inspite of what you think The other person has apologized to us for disrespecting our home and told me what happened. You as a guest in our house had no right to use our bed for your selfish reasons and invite your former boy friend over. The fact that you don’t see anything wrong with that demonstrates how little respect you have for your former friends or their home. We left our home and went somewhere else to sleep so you and our other friends had a place to stay. We gave up our room for your guys. It is absolutely my business if friends have sex in my bed without asking first when my wife and I have given up our bed for guests. So you invite your ex boyfriend over and sleep with him in our bed and when confronted lie about it? Classy.

As a side note, you were so concerned with Colin trying to get with your friend that you confronted him in public in front of our friends while intoxicated and incited a fight. Yet you left them alone together in another room as you hooked up with your ex? Or was it just talking according to your story? Either way, Hypocritical.

Second, even though you were disrespectful to Lauren and I (never once apologizing for the way you acted, never once expressing appreciation that we gave up our room for you or thanking us for allowing you to stay in our apartment) the lying is what makes this worse. You have a problem telling the truth and that’s your fault. Not Mike, Colin, Lauren or I, that’s your fault. Good look being an Army officer and lawyer when you don’t have the integrity to tell the truth when asked.

Third, against my better judgment, I agreed to Lauren having you as a bridesmaid because at that time you were friends. I sincerely thought that you had dramatically changed since college. That was a mistake. The disrespect you demonstrated at our wedding was abhorrent. Attacking your former boyfriend in front of OUR friends and OUR family was disrespectful to us on our wedding night. How dare you act like that? It further demonstrates that you have no respect for others and your former friends. Reminds me of the drunken fights you use to start in Gainesville that nearly led to arrests; now your have graduated to disrupting weddings.

Fourth, your not a victim; your the problem. You instigated a fight with Colin by accusing him of behaving a certain way with your friend. That is very hypocritical on your part and again disrespectful. However, the worse part is that the fight in the car could have gotten someone killed. You continued to anger Colin to point where he tried to attack you and I had to restrain him while trying to control the car. Instead of allowing cooler heads to prevail you continued to incite him with accusations that he cheated on his now deployed girlfriend. All of this demonstrates that you are in instigator and a dangerous one at that. Again, reminds me over your countless actions in Gainesville.

Fifth, at any point you could have accepted responsibility and simply apologized for your actions. Whether you agreed with being confronted or not, it was your choice to either apologize or offer some appropriate response. You did neither. Your response was, and I quote, “Do you want to inspect my vagina to look for semen?” Again, very classy Stephanie. And you wonder why I have no respect for you and your actions.

Sixth, you never should have involved OUR friends in your actions. They were not involved, did not want to be involved and also do not appreciate you involving them. Unfortunately for you, they also are aware of the truth, your lying and you ability to put on quit a performance. Just like Lauren and I are not fooled by you; they are not fooled by your either. My friends that witnessed you behavior first hand and saw how your tried to provoke Colin think you are psychopathic nuttjob. It was a good try on your part but they all see through you and realize your not the victim; your the problem.

Because you have bad mouthed Lauren and I to our friends, when I am asked about this little episode by the friends you have involved in this, I will make sure the truth is established. And it will be made clear that you were given the opportunity to make this right and you choose not too. You defriend us on facebook like a high school kid instead of acting like an attorney and an Army officer by reaching out to fix the relationship. Again, thank you for making this part easy.

Again, instead of trying to apologize for your actions, you have taken the path of feeling sorry for yourself and being the victim. Your not.

Lets remove all doubt as to why we are no longer want you as a friend. For the record, we are tired of your and your childish behavior. We are tired of the disrespect and lying. Lauren and I are no longer your friends those reasons. We don’t want you involved in our lives whatsoever. Just so your clear, you have lost our friendship because of your lying, deceit, selfcenterdness, disrespectful attitude and lack of integrity. And total failure to even attempt to apologize or make this right. You are the same person you were in Gainesville, always selfish, always the victim and never one to take responsibility or try to make things right.

You made this choice. Even though it is sad that things ended this way, we are actually very relieved not to ever to deal with you or your needless drama again.

This will catch up with you one day and karma will pay you back in full. You will reap that which you sow Stephanie. Count it.

To quote you “have a good one”

Jeremiah

I know I shouldn’t expect people to, like, know stuff any more and I know it doesn’t really matter, but I post this here because:

1. I can’t believe that I seem to be the only person in the world who has noticed; and
2. It’s not often that that English degree I spent three years studying for comes in handy.

According to the story on the front page of today’s The Age, and apparently every other media outlet in the world, President Obama, speaking at a white tie function at Buck House last night, “concluded his toast with a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III“:

Obama concluded his toast with a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III.

‘To her Majesty the Queen, to the vitality of the special relationship between our peoples and in the words of Shakespeare, ‘to this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

Except he didn’t, did he, because that quote isn’t from Richard the third, it’s the John of Gaunt, “This Other Eden” speech from Richard the second:

This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England

(Funny how he left out the bit about “against the envy of less happier lands”, can’t think why…)

It’s the sort of thing you might expect a good sub editor to pick up.

Oh. Oops. This is the sort of thing that happens why you sack them all, isn’t it…

Meh. Richard II, Richard III. It’s all the same thing really isn’t it?

I’ve moaned about stupid design patterns on the mobile web before, but here’s another example of just how frustrating it can be when web developers decide to lock you out of their site just because you happen to be using a mobile device.

This time the culprits are Singapore Airlines, one of my favourite airlines. Shame their web presence sucks.

I have a flight coming up shortly and there’s a great big flight cancelling ash cloud floating over Europe at the moment, so I thought I might check the airline website for an update on any cancellations.

Unfortunately if I head over there on my iPhone, I get this:

Oh great. I’ve been “automatically redirected to Singapore Airlines mobile which is optimised for mobile devices”. I just love it when that happens.

Ok. Let’s click the link to go to their mobile website:

Um. Ok. Sure. I’ll agree to anything if you just let me in to your site.

But then there’s this:

What? I just want to look at your website to find out whether you are cancelling flights. Why do you need my phone number? What are you going to do with it?

But ok I’ll type in some random numbers just to get through the next hurdle. Finally we get to the site:

Oh. That’s it? There might be a link to flight status down the bottom, but that means putting in an individual flight number or route. If you just want to find a general news item about the ash cloud like the one they have on their full desktop website but you happen to be using an iPhone or similar then you’re out of luck.

No link to go to the full site. Nothing.

Thanks web development team at Singapore Airlines. I love it when developers decide on my behalf that my device isn’t capable of rendering their site and lock me out.

Luckily, there’s a solution to this and all other future annoying mobile web related issues: a bit of Googling leads me to this website recommending an app called “Journey Web Browser Lite”–a Safari replacement that includes one genius feature: browser user agent spoofing.

Settings -> Pretend To Be -> Firefox 3.0

In your face annoying web developers:

(Also: look! Look at that battery meter: it cost me 5% of my battery to take those screenshots. Gotta love the battery life on a two year old iPhone…)

Can’t help thinking there might be a missing word in this headline or something.

Either that or property prices back home have taken a massive hit…

In the olden days it was a lot easier for newspapers to pass off ridiculous claims as facts because anyone who wanted to verify them would have to go to some serious effort to do so. These days, however, we have teh internets, and fact checking has suddenly become a whole lot easier.

So if you’re going to make claims about teh internets, then you’d better be pretty sure that your claimed facts are, you know, actually true.

Case in point number 247 is this article in the Daily Mail: Google threatens to destroy not only pop sensation Adele, but Britain’s film and music industries.

Scroll down towards the end of the article and you’ll find this astonishing claim:

One only has to switch on the computer, call up the Google search engine and type in the name of a star like Adele to understand why the digital channel is such a threat to the UK’s performers, and for that matter our whole creative industry.

Nine out of the first ten websites which pop up on Google’s search engine are run by pirates who have downloaded Adele’s output and offer it online far more cheaply than official copyrighted sites and High Street retailers.

In effect, Google has granted these piracy sites a licence to steal. Instead of the proceeds going into future investment in artists, it ends up in the hands of internet buccaneers.

Really? Nine out of the top ten search results for “Adele” are “run by pirates”? Did you really think you could make a claim like that and nobody would check?

(And by “far more cheaply”, I presume you mean “free”, no? Unless you really believe your claim that any proceeds are someone ending up in the hands of “internet buccaneers”…)

Anyway. So I turned on my computer and “called up the Google search engine” and did just that. Your mileage may vary, because Google now gives you geographically specific and personalised search results, but when I try that very search I get her official website, her wikipedia page, her MySpace page, a YouTube link, her Facebook page, last.fm, a lyrics website and Amazon.com.

Hmm. No pirates there.

Now I’m not suggesting that it isn’t possible to find copies of Adele’s music by doing a Google search, but you do have to specifically go looking for it. And until someone releases an album called “BitTorrent Download”, you won’t really be able to accuse Google of promoting piracy.

Actually, that’s sort of the point of a search engine–Google’s job is to index the internet, not to pick and choose what is worthy of inclusion in their index. Blaming them for the fact that certain websites show up in their search results seems to be the very definition of shooting the messenger.

Unless you have some other specific reason to be annoyed at Google. Oh, hang on…

So dominant has it become that it has helped to destroy great swathes of other media in its wake, from regional newspapers in Britain and the United States to business directory companies.

Ah. I see.

I was transported back to an earlier time, last night, as I sat listening to hold music being told that my call is important but that all the customer service agents are busy right now, and I realised that I don’t really do this any more. Much as I loved living in London, it seems as if I was always hanging on hold trying to sort out some problem or other. I still remember the time that I spent so long on hold to Homechoice/Tiscali trying to sort out some problem or other with my broadband that I listened to an entire Leona Lewis album before someone answered. Happy days…

But I can’t remember the last time anything like that happened.

Maybe this is the real reason why I haven’t been blogging so much since we moved to Melbourne. There just isn’t enough to get pissed off about here (and on the rare occasions when I have to call my lovely ISP, iinet, they even do this wonderful thing where you just hang up and they call you back, and then use the caller ID to pull up your account details before you even start talking to them…)

Of course it goes without saying that the company I was on hold to was in the UK: I’ve decided that it’s finally time to extricate myself from the company that hosts my other web presence. Originally this was hosted by an excellent small hosting company called Freedom2Surf, who I picked about 10 years ago when I first set up that site in a vague attempt to make it look like I’d done at least one extra-curricular thing at uni that I could put on my CV. And they were great for about 5 years, until they got taken over. And taken over. And taken over again. Following the most recent takeover they have been completely rebranded and I now find myself a customer of Talk Talk Business.

I’ve moaned about them before, but general laziness has always kept me from doing anything about it. But with the latest rebrand the old F2S website account area is gone. I used to be able to log in and check my account details, see past invoices, and update my account settings, address and billing details. Now I have the My Talk Talk Business Portal, which provides almost zero functionality. I can log in to this and see that I have an account, but that’s about it. No invoices, no pricing, no indication when my hosting or registrations expire–everything just leads to a message telling me to phone a UK 0800 number if I want to do anything. That’s a bit of a deal breaker for me, though, given that I live on the other side of the world now and it’s not massively convenient to have to call someone in the UK whenever I need to do something…

I can’t even update my address details because their wonderful portal has been coded to accept only UK postcodes and phone numbers. Oh and when they rebranded they also sent me a letter in the mail to my house in Australia containing my login password, which they had apparently been storing in plain text all this time. Oops.

So it’s time to sort this out: unfortunately I just paid for a new year’s hosting and registration before the rebrand, but as a first step I thought I’d try to get the .co.uk domain that I have registered with them (www.pastemagazine.co.uk) moved over to my other (cheaper, better) host (who are probably preparing to sell out to Talk Talk as we speak…) so that they will be the ones who bill me when it comes up for renewal in a couple of months. 20 minutes of hold music later, and having been passed between 3 departments, I finally get through to someone who can help me:

“Oh yes. You need to send us an email to request that, as all cancellations have to be in writing.”

Thanks. Wonderful. Thanks so much for writing that on your website… Now can I have the last half hour of my life back?

I know I got there first with the best Gmail address for our name, but just because you’re jealous it doesn’t mean you have to give out my email address to people and pretend it’s yours…

So no, “The Cast of Disneyland Paris”, I don’t think I can give you feedback on my recent visit there, given that I haven’t left Australia for over a year.

I also won’t be reviewing my recent stay at the Hilton Taba Resort Nelson Village in Egypt (although what I thought I was doing there casually taking my resort holiday in the middle of a revolution is a mystery to me–I guess at least one of the other Matts is actually a dick…)

It gets worse. Apparently I am also in the real estate business, profiting from people’s misery by selling foreclosed properties in Indiana. But I won’t be showing you around this one. Maybe you’d be better off contacting the Matt Armstrong who’s listed on the site instead of emailing me. Just a thought.

And Matt, if you’re going to sign up to a restaurant loyalty program, you might want to include your own email address. Although having said that, since their emails have an “edit profile” link at the bottom, I was able to log in and see the address and phone number of my property in Baton Rouge, LA. Perhaps I’ll turn up one day and move in.

Actually, perhaps I should consider some kind of identity fraud on people with the same name as me. Shouldn’t be too difficult, because apparently they are all idiots.

So I was signing up for an account at consumer-discounts-website OzBargain, when I happened to notice something a bit odd in the terms and conditions I was agreeing to…

Terms and Conditions of Use

Account Inactivity

After a period of inactivity, OzBargain reserves the right to disable or terminate a user’s account. If an account has been deactivated for inactivity, the email address associated with that account may be given to another user without notice to you or such other party.

I’m sorry, what? If I don’t use my account for a bit you are going to re-assign my email address to someone else? My email address? Have you checked with Google on that? ‘Cause I don’t think they’d let you give away my Gmail address to someone else…

Or did you just copy your terms and conditions from someone else without checking whether it made any sense in the context of your website…?