The Eagles Are Not Flying High

The Eagles have just arrived in the Qantas lounge at Adelaide. Looks like their ‘flight’ was ‘grounded’, too. Woosha is reviewing the team’s performance on the laptop while the rest of the team catches the Fremantle game on the big screen.

37 Down at Half Time

The last place on earth you want to be as an Eagles supporter is in the Adelaide airport surrounded by Crows supporters while your team is down by 37 points at half-time.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. I was meant to be 37 thousand feet above all this, on the way to Sydney. And the Eagles were also meant to be up.
About an hour into our Perth-Sydney flight someone noticed a crack in the window of our 747. It’s not a big crack, only *halfway* through the 2 layers of glass separating us from the -30 degree temperatures outside. The plane dipped fairly sharply and descended to about 25 thousand feet.
The captain assures us that, with his 22 years flying experience, he would rather put safety ahead of schedule. In his 22 years of flying, it’s happened before, most notably on a much longer flight to Singapore. However, 22 years of flying experience leads him to think it would be a better idea to cut the flight short. Presumably, he’s aiming for 23 years of experience.
Sure enough, as we alighted, you could see a crack quite clearly through about a third of one of the external windows. Looks dodgy. Someone should probably take a look at that.
It was probably caused by the ear-splitting shrieking of that unsettled child three rows ahead of me during takeoff.
So, 4 hours in Adelaide. Or, more specifically, Adelaide Airport.
Half way.

Do Not Be Annoying The Person

Looks like the geeks will have their day: mobile phones in planes.

I can’t say that I’m a fan, but I can see where the pressure has come from. By the time you’ve completed the various formalities of getting yourself on a plane, the plane in the air, and your airline meal in your lap, it’s the most waking hours most of us will spend out-of-contact.

I don’t begrudge travellers their fix, if there’s a way to provide the service without MAIKNG THE PLANE ASPLODE like we’ve been told all these years. (A danger when refuelling? Pah. Ban polyester.)

A few airlines are honest about the real reasons for the ban. On a recent Japan trip, Japan Air Lines told it how it is:

“Please do not use your mobile telephone as it will annoy the person”

Bonwag's New Life

It’s about the right time of year to get some long-neglected web projects out of the way:

  • Like finally updating the code behind the ‘latest/greatest’ section to point to Amazon’s new eCommerce system. No big deal, but it was lots of fun digging through some old, rotten SOAP programming and updating it for the 21st century.
  • Like finally updating the Family Tree to work again. I had some reformatting to do because of the new version of the genealogy software I use, and had neglected it for too long. I also had to remove some personal details that had crept in there by accident. Scarcely a week goes by that someone doesn’t email me with a distant link they have discovered. The internet rocks.

Some guys go out to the garage on their long weekends. I like to to keep the fingernails clean.

Geraldton's Batavia Blow-ins

Wow. Someone’s finally woken up to the Batavia story and written a feature film about it.

I headed up the newsroom for 98FM in Geraldton for a while in the early 90s. Not a week passed that there wasn’t some angle about the Batavia, or the wreck, or the ship’s discoverers, or some new snippet of information about the grisly history out at the Abrolhos islands. A story of duelling museum curators may not sound like much, but in a place where wind and wheat rule, it’s news.

So, Hollywood is coming to Cow Town. The Guardian won’t know what to do with itself.

Now, if only someone would do something about getting the (far, far more interesting) Catalpa story onto the big screen, WA would be all set. Who needs a resources boom?

Spam, Lovely Spam

Celebrations cometh.
We are happy to notify you of your shinning luck following the draws of our wealth creation program held on the 29th of August, 2007 whereby the ticket attached to your email address drew lucky winning numbers.  We have, till now, all but given up hope in contacting you due to inadequate information.

Woo hoo! Shinning luck!

And with inadequate information, too!

No, I Asked For A NICE Coffee, Lou

No sooner had I twittermoaned of the dearth of decent ice coffee recipes on Perth dairy shelves than Pauline suggests ‘Brownes Dome Supa Shake’. Ainslie dutifully finds one (somehow) and brings one home for me.

Not bad. Not bad at all. I’d put it in my top 7 or so.

For the benefits of other Australian ice coffee aficionados (or ‘iced coffee‘ as Wikipedia puts it) herewith find enclosed a useful reference guide.

I rate Ice Coffees on the ‘three Cs’, and out of 5 Moos.

  • Coffeeness – does it use a flavour that actually tastes like coffee? And a coffee flavour that actually tastes good when it is cold?
  • Cowness – the ‘fresh milk’ factor. Was a real cow involved in the production, or has the UHT demon turned it lactic-flaccid?
  • Creaminess – this is the X factor – the thing that separates a good ice coffee from a normal coffee that has just been left in the fridge.

Continue reading No, I Asked For A NICE Coffee, Lou