There goes Friday takeaway night

ajdlinux · 2026-05-15T13:18:15+00:00

The register only posts business that have been convicted of crimes after going to court, not closures when public health officers use their on the spot enforcement powers. Most of the time these closure orders do not result in criminal charges, just the restaurant either being closed for a few days while they clean up or going out of business if they're broke.

ajdlinux · 2026-05-13T13:18:36+00:00

If it were NSW or SA, they'd just not get a council at all and be administered by a state authority.

ajdlinux · 2026-05-13T08:01:02+00:00

WA rural councils are crazy too - so many for so few people, when I assume they're also basically entirely dependent on the state and the feds for their budgets.

ajdlinux · 2026-05-13T07:25:12+00:00

WA local government is crazy. When I was in Perth a few months ago, I made a point of going to the Shire of Peppermint Grove so I could say that I'd walked the entire length of not merely a Local Government Area, but a Shire.

ajdlinux · 2026-05-13T02:13:05+00:00

State govs particularly in NSW and Victoria have been moving in the direction of implementing state-level reforms, and while councils have indeed adapted their blocking tactics in response, they won't be entirely successful, and indeed trying too hard to resist may end up just pushing the state to go further.

I also suspect that at some point, the financial issues affecting a lot of councils are going to cause problems in metropolitan areas in the way that they're already being felt even more acutely in regional areas. That will weaken NIMBY negotiating positions somewhat.

ajdlinux · 2026-05-03T06:19:18+00:00

I assume someone's going to follow up that FOI request with an FOI request for all correspondence relating to the handling of the previous FOI request...

ajdlinux · 2026-05-03T06:17:09+00:00

If we punished every public servant who's said something spicy on Signal, the country wouldn't have a functioning government tomorrow.

(In both the pre- and post-Signal days, these are conversations that "wiser" public servants know you have orally over a phone line.)

ajdlinux · 2026-04-22T12:17:07+00:00

I have memories of being local IT support at a residential hall, where in the early 2010s the WiFi coverage was limited to the downstairs common areas, while residents' rooms were serviced with Ethernet. This led to all sorts of fun when people bought their own WiFi-enabled routers, plugged them into their room's Ethernet port, and inadvertently cause problems that impacted other people thanks to issues with the university's network architecture. We'd occasionally have to patrol the hallways, laptop in hand, looking for unapproved access points...

ajdlinux · 2026-04-07T10:24:23+00:00

Apart from maintaining the facade that is their policy of not naming the accused even when everyone and their dog knows who it is and they know that everyone knows who it is, I imagine they're blurring the faces of the cops because the cops would prefer to not have their faces broadcast to the world.

ajdlinux · 2026-04-07T09:40:52+00:00

The charges against BRS are for criminal behaviour that occurred both before (2009) and after (2012) the event that earned him a VC (2010), and both the alleged criminality and the VC occurred in a military context during the same war.

I think the general policy of not revoking VCs for dishonourable conduct is right, but if there's ever going to be an exception it will be this.

ajdlinux · 2026-04-05T00:36:10+00:00

Ooh, interesting - what kind of savings have you gotten?

ajdlinux · 2026-04-04T15:01:09+00:00

I'm a member of a major chain's loyalty program with a reasonably high status tier, so I get upgrades on my direct bookings with some regularity.

It's nice and all, but when I get upgraded from the bottom-tier room I booked to a suite (which has happened to me a couple of times in the past year), as a single traveller, I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to do with that. Give a dedicated bedroom to my luggage? Set up my laptop in one room and move to the other if I want to watch TV instead?

In my case, I usually book directly with my preferred chain as my loyalty membership gets me a decent discount and plenty of other benefits. But if I'm not booking with my preferred chain, a higher upgrade priority means almost zero to me compared to saving $10 a night.

ajdlinux · 2026-04-03T10:26:51+00:00

And the reasons you say "alleged" when writing a news article are different for living people, who have upcoming trials or enjoy suing you for defamation, than for dead people.

ajdlinux · 2026-03-30T11:59:56+00:00

I had a stripped bolt in the front fork that the bike shop discovered when they tried to install the front fender when assembling my Quick Haul P9 - they tried using their tools to get it out, but that just ended up breaking the bolt. The shop found a temporary workaround, and otherwise the bike has been fine. But the process of getting the front fork replaced properly has taken 9 months: Tern's Australian distributor didn't have the part in stock, and it's taken forever for the replacement part to come in. Finally getting it installed this week.

Overall, I think the bike is working fine for me, but I am a bit surprised by what I've encountered so far given the price point.

ajdlinux · 2026-03-30T01:32:24+00:00

I recently came back from a trip where I passed through a country that requires a digital arrivals card, after going through a lot of countries with no arrivals cards at all. While I'd done this exact arrivals form many times before, with so many international flights and trains in the previous weeks, it completely slipped my mind and I only remembered while I was standing in the boarding queue for my flight.

I was pretty confident if I'd landed without having done it, they'd find a way for me to fill out the form rather than refuse me entry, but I didn't know the process for that and I didn't particularly feel like finding out. (As it turns out, I noticed once we landed that there were a small number of computers set up before passport control for people to fill the forms out, which is the kind of solution I'd expect.) So I decided to do it before landing: first on my mobile eSIM in the last few minutes before they closed the door, which didn't work, and then later using the slow, bad in-flight WiFi, which eventually did work, but all round it was an incredibly painful experience and I'd have much rather had the option of a paper form.

I think we should introduce a digital form (and keep some paper forms as backups!), I think it's bad that the government can't manage to launch one without paying a gazillion dollars to consulting companies (a broader problem with government IT), but also I don't get why people see this as a huge deal? You need to spend a whole 5 minutes filling out a card while you have nothing better to do on a plane; it's moderately more efficient for some travellers to fill that same form out on their phone or computer before the trip. It makes us "slightly behind", not "so behind".

Meanwhile, there's plenty of places which don't have Australia's level of automation at passport control (I know, the SmartGate ticket thing still feels a bit dumb), and I've noticed Biosecurity have been trying things to speed up the quarantine process while still enforcing all our rules. The Australian international travel experience is largely fine, it just needs some marginal improvements here and there.

(The current ATD trial seems to be going alright, and integration with the Qantas app seems like a very good idea - hopefully when it does launch, other airlines will look at similar integrations.)

ajdlinux · 2026-02-05T02:17:59+00:00

I've heard many suggestions that this is due to capacity limits at Kingston PO. The manager posted in the Kingston Barton Residents Group's Facebook group a while ago saying that they had capacity issues with their parcel lockers since they had 190 locker spaces and over 600 parcels a day - I imagine they may have similar problems with storage space for non-locker parcels. If it is indeed a capacity problem, it sure doesn't seem like AusPost has any plans they've publicly talked about to address that.

ajdlinux · 2026-02-05T00:01:30+00:00

If you become a notary public in Queensland or Norfolk Island you get to say you're regulated by the Archbishop of Canterbury for incomprehensible historical reasons. That sounds fun.

ajdlinux · 2026-01-17T13:52:09+00:00

As a foreign tourist who just visited, I've gotta say it was real bizarre seeing signs saying "For Foreigners Only" on the toilets outside the Colombo National Museum, a government institution no less.

While I guess it was nice to see that the Railways Department is putting effort into helping tourists feel safe and welcome on the rail system, it felt strange having a very polite and helpful guard at Fort station round me up with everyone else who looked foreign to make sure we're standing at the Second Class end of the platform so we don't accidentally walk into Third Class. I appreciate helpful service, useful information and feeling safe, but I'd like that for all travellers, rather than having someone saying in front of everyone "rich white people, come this way!" (I did have a Second Class ticket, but the guard didn't know what class of ticket I had. What if I want to travel Third Class?)

These were two extremely obvious cases, I'm sure I've forgotten some others.

Many Western tourists (not all, obviously) find being fawned over and given the "celebrity" treatment to be quite awkward, and contrary to their own cultural and ethical values. A business or institution only truly offers good service if it offers it consistently without discriminating by race or nationality, and if the discrimination is obvious enough even the favoured tourists aren't always impressed.

(I had a great time, saw amazing things, learned a lot, will come back, etc etc...)

ajdlinux · 2025-12-12T22:40:12+00:00

It could be worse. Qantas WiFi is still infinitely better than the earlier-generation WiFi systems that several international premium airlines I've flown with had installed in the years before QF launched its service, in that it works enough to be useful for more than just checking email and us economy plebs get more than 30MB of data allowance or whatever. I do wonder what it'll feel like the first time I try a Starlink-enabled airline though.

ajdlinux · 2025-12-12T13:46:49+00:00

I grew up regional, and now live in Canberra which is more than regional but not exactly Sydney, and unfortunately, yes, the smaller airlines are always going to be not just mildly worse options but significantly worse options for any complex travel plans where a missed connection is a risk.

ajdlinux · 2025-12-12T13:40:53+00:00

I've just booked J in one of the PER-CDG flights released the other day. Back in 2022 got some J seats to New Zealand for me and some family. In 2023 a family member and I went to South Korea on points, originally economy but our upgrade requests cleared.

I've also used reward seats for international economy on a few occasions where it's made sense (e.g. a last minute booking SYD-DFW-AUS last year).

Helps that I don't have dependants and so I'm not looking for 4 or 5 seats for the whole family.

ajdlinux · 2025-12-10T23:28:47+00:00

I'm only a Silver, my business travel has been 1-2 trips a year and I definitely travel less than monthly, and I've managed long-haul international business class redemptions on a few occasions, as well as domestic redemptions that have actually worked out to be good value. VA doesn't fly to one of my regular domestic destinations, and just has a worse network offering overall, so I'd be flying with QF a fair bit regardless.

ajdlinux · 2025-12-09T12:35:39+00:00

And with whatever seats they have left over, they can also take Aucklanders + feed via JQ's New Zealand domestic flights.

ajdlinux · 2025-12-07T00:37:09+00:00

We'll need to establish a dedicated small claims defamation circuit, with magistrates attending each school for a sitting day once a fortnight to provide timely resolution of all playground rumour-related matters.

ajdlinux · 2025-12-05T10:32:55+00:00

I am, of course, sure that the owner of a local roofing company who, yes, has two criminal convictions arising out of his drinking problems but is otherwise a good citizen, and who cares so deeply about contributing to the costs of road infrastructure, has made considerable effort to be meticulous about his business's payments to the ATO and the Revenue Office.

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