Today is Canberra Day, a public holiday in Canberra to celebrate the naming of Canberra on March 12, 1913, by Lady Denman, wife of then Governor-General Lord Denman.
I, however, am working today, and happily doing so. Canberra Day is of little significance to me these days as it isn’t even remotely close to the actual anniversary of the naming of Canberra (the ACT Government are moving it to the second Monday of March next year, but that’s still not good enough, it should be March 12 every year), and the Balloon Fiesta doesn’t coincide with it any more. I remember when the Balloon Fiesta was a nine-day event which wrapped up on Canberra Day. In recent years it has been moved to April, and now to add insult to injury, Chief Turnip Stanhope has shortened it to a four day event in a vain attempt to plug his budgetary disaster.
You would think that Canberra Day, being the official celebration of the birthday of Canberra would actually contain a celebration…but Skyfire (fireworks for those of you outside Canberra) was held nine days ago, the Balloon Fiesta has moved to April, the multicultural festival takes place during summer (I could be certain that it used to happen in March before the Stanhope government), and we don’t even have a re-enactment of the naming ceremony (could be a tad hard with Parliament House sitting there these days…but why not have it outside the Legislative Assembly).
As far as I’m concerned, Canberra Day is just another generic, pointless, public holiday, much like the Queen’s Birthday in June (she was born in April). I’m more than happy to work today as the day is now completely meaningless as a public holiday.
Apart from which, public holidays like this are strange…why would I want the day off today when nothing useful is open, when I can hang on to the day off for a day when I might actually have a chance of getting something done?
Perhaps somebody was right when they said I was born to be a nutty old man…I just think I’m being logical.
It’s been nearly a year and seven months since this blog moved to paid hosting with Bluehost, but the time has come for me to move hosting company, to the Australian (and seemingly a lot more reliable) AussieHQ.
The move will take place this week, but unlike the move from free to paid hosting, the address will not change, whilst this is a good thing as it won’t break links and email addresses etc, it will cause some semi-downtime while the server change propagates around the DNS system. This will mean that some people will see the new server long before others do, and unfortunately Bigpond users will probably be among the last to make the move as Telstra are notoriously slow at updating DNS.
If you understood the last paragraph, skip this one…the DNS system is what holds the Internet together, it converts domain names like samuelgordonstewart.com to IP addresses like 69.89.18.35, which in turn allows your computer to find websites. Generally your computer will find out IP addresses from a DNS server run by your ISP, and due to the sheer number of DNS servers out there it takes a matter of hours for them all to be updated. Some, like the ones at Telstra, are setup to take longer than others.
This move is the reason there is no weekly poll this week, as the poll relies on the database on the server running this website, and it would be pointless to have two servers running the same poll and receiving votes from a different set of people. Other disruptions this week will occur in comments, once I initiate the transfer comments on the old server will be disabled as I really don’t feel like copying a whole heap of comments between servers. Email shouldn’t be affected as I forward email to Gmail anyway, and will set up those forwarders on the new server ASAP. From a viewing perspective, there should be minimal disruption on this website as I will schedule things to appear on both the new and old servers prior to the migration.
So why am I moving the website? Well I have a few reasons…
Firstly, whilst Bluehost have generally been good, their reliability has diminished over the last few months. I have noticed an increase in the number of times the webserver has not bothered to respond, and the FTP server is getting slower and now seems to be randomly freezing. It’s been a while since this site has gone down completely, but when it does, it does it in style. Bluehost don’t handle this downtime very well either, trying to get information from them about outages is incredibly difficult, they usually claim there is no outage and never bother to inform anyone of scheduled maintenance.
Last time there was a major outage it was due to scheduled maintenance (no attempt was made to notify customers) where they were moving between data centres, or something to that effect. They botched it, and were offline for hours. I’m also not at all convinced that their promised backup generators exist…when the power went out on a separate occasion, so did they, on multiple occasions…they supposedly had enough power for the servers but not the air conditioning, so they didn’t run the servers for fear of over heating. I would probably have done the same thing, but I have to wonder why they only had enough generators for the servers.
Secondly, Bluehost are in the US, the vast majority of the readers of this website are in Australia. The time it takes to transfer data to and from the US might not be particularly long, but for the vast majority of readers, connecting to a Canberra based server would be much faster. I also have reason the believe that AussieHQ’s servers are much more responsive than Bluehost’s, so any extra data transfer time for anybody overseas should be more or less offset by a better performing server.
It is my personal opinion that Bluehost is an example of what’s wrong with the massive super-cheap US hosting industry. When I joined Bluehost they were still relatively small, had a good offer, and kept their promises. The problem as they have grown is that to remain competitive they have to keep their prices low and increase the service offered…economically speaking, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t provide them with the room to improve their services or upgrade their servers in a logical manner, instead they are forced to put as many people on the same server as they possibly can.
It’s not their fault, it is the US hosting industry in general which seems to be suffering, but none of them want to publicly admit to it…instead they all (Bluehost in particular) make a lot of noise about how they are optimising this that and everything else in in the Linux kernel and other parts of the server to make the servers run better, but you can only push a server so hard before it starts to have issues. Apparently the server this website is hosted on is one of the more reliable servers…and that’s a worry as it isn’t exactly running brilliantly.
There may be a few minor glitches in the changeover, especially if you happen to be one of the lucky people who use a DNS server which gets the new IP address in first hour or so of the new server being in operation. During the first couple of hours there may be a bit of downtime while I make sure things are working as they should, and finish off uploading everything.
To ease the transfer, the notification area at the top of each page will indicate whether you are looking at the new or old server. I will also schedule a bunch of articles to appear on both servers simultaneously so that the site doesn’t come to a complete halt.
With any luck, the migration will be pain-free, and you will all be looking at the new server not long after it is up and running.
At this stage I haven’t decided whether to start the migration tomorrow or on Wednesday, although I am leaning towards tomorrow.
If you’ve got any questions about this, now is probably a good time to ask them!
This week the award goes to Don McLean, and the feature song is the rather long “American Pie”.
A long, long time ago…
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.
But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn’t take one more step.
I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.
So bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.
Did you write the book of love,
And do you have faith in God above,
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock ‘n’ roll,
Can music save your mortal soul,
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?
Well, I know that you’re in love with him
`cause I saw you dancin’ in the gym.
You both kicked off your shoes.
Man, I dig those rhythm and blues.
I was a lonely teenage broncin buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck,
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died.
I started singin’,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.
Now for ten years weve been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone,
But that’s not how it used to be.
When the jester sang for the king and queen,
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me,
Oh, and while the king was looking down,
The jester stole his thorny crown.
The courtroom was adjourned;
No verdict was returned.
And while Lennon read a book on Marx,
The quartet practiced in the park,
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died.
We were singing,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.
Helter skelter in a summer swelter.
The birds flew off with a fallout shelter,
Eight miles high and fallin’ fast.
It landed foul on the grass.
The players tried for a forward pass,
With the jester on the sidelines in a cast.
Now the half-time air was sweet perfume
While the sergeants played a marching tune.
We all got up to dance,
Oh, but we never got the chance!
`cause the players tried to take the field;
The marching band refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?
We started singing,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.
Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again.
So come on: Jack be nimble, Jack be quick!
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
Cause fire is the devils only friend.
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
No angel born in hell
Could break that Satan spell.
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite,
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
He was singing,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.
I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just smiled and turned away.
I went down to the sacred store
Where I’d heard the music years before,
But the man there said the music wouldn’t play.
And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.
And they were singing,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die.
They were singing,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, this’ll be the day that I die.
There isn’t going to be a weekly poll this week as the website is moving to new hosting, and there would be no reasonable way to regulate voting during the migration. I’ll explain the reasons soon, but first here are the results from last week’s poll.
Has Jon Stanhope done a good job as Chief Minister of the ACT?
Not surprisingly Jon Stanhope did not fare well in the poll, receiving what a Newspoll would probably call a “38% approval rate”. I did find it interesting that very close to the end of the week, votes started to sharply turn in the Chief Turnip’s favour. It’s fairly well known that Stanhope has a bunch of loyal followers who try to rig this kind of vote in his favour, so I do have to wonder if they were involved in the late turn in Stanhope’s favour.
The weekly poll will return next week when the migration to a new server is well and truly over.
You had a caller earlier who claimed that people over the age of 80 should not be forced to vote because either they might not live until the next election, or it is too hard to get to a polling booth.
Well the first argument is nuts in my mind…none of us are guaranteed to live until the next election…does that mean we should all get optional voting? Optional voting isn't something you can give to one group and not another, and I personally think it should remain compulsory.
As for the second point, well we have this thing called a postal vote…and I believe that the electoral commission can visit people in hospitals, so if it is too hard to get to the polling booth, you do have other options.
I would hate to miss out on my chance to shape the future of the nation, and it upsets me that others don't see their right to vote in the same light, and treat it with as much respect.
The backlog is long, I’ve been slack, people have been pestering me, and after speaking to a “Pete” on the phone yesterday afternoon (he knows who he is…isn’t that a strange expression, of course he knows who he is, that why he was able to tell me!) who was particularly convincing…it’s time for the radio reviews to resume and 666 ABC Canberra just happens to be next on the list. The is their first radio review in the series, although I have previously reviewed them informally.
This is a review of 666 ABC Canberra from 5pm-6pm on Monday the 26th of February.
5:00pm: News, Sport, Weather. I didn’t know that the ABC started news bulletins in the somewhat commercial style of playing a news related quote…apparently they do…followed by headlines and then the stories. There’s a strange hum on some of the reports which sounds like the reporter is sitting on a microwave though, and it is quite distracting. The newsreader also seemed to stumble over words a lot…I probably just caught her at a bad hour. Chris Kimble (spelling?) did a good job with the sport, but those word stumbles cost the newsreader a lot of time and the weather turned into a two liner. (9:58)
5:09pm: Drive with Louise Maher (8 second intro). Louise summarises some local news issues and eventually starts a traffic report which only includes two breakdowns on the Tuggeranong Parkway…no information about traffic flows whatsoever, perhaps they should learn to use their Australian Traffic Network subscription properly…or do they not pay enough for access to that kind of information?
5:12pm: Louise promotes an upcoming interview with Pauline Hanson, but talks with an anti-Hanson (and anything which isn’t one of the big three political parties) Queensland professor first.
5:14pm: Louise talks to Pauline Hanson, tries to convince her that everything the professor said was gospel, asks Pauline for her policies (she’s running for the senate, they review decisions, not make them), then asks if she will be working with One Nation Party senator Len Harris…who just happens to not be in parliament any more, Pauline corrects her and she sounds absolutely shocked and struggles to come up with a question, eventually settling on who Pauline would like to work with…Pauline re-emphasises the fact that she is running as an independent. Louise then moves on to illegal immigrants, effectively telling everyone to vote Labor in the process, and then asking Pauline for her views…a subject she Louise quickly moves away from after trying to talk over the top of Pauline…we move on to what Pauline thinks of John Howard and Kevin Rudd…that’s funny, no talking over the top of Pauline while she explains why it will be tough for John Howard to win the next election, some failed attempts to talk over the top of Pauline Hanson when she disagrees with Kevin Rudd’s ideas…and then it’s back to how wonderful the professor is. After the interview it was interesting to hear Louise emphasise the word “again” in the sentence “Pauline Hanson, the former leader of One Nation, who has announced today that she will be standing for parliament again (pause) this time as an independent for a Queensland seat in the senate”.
5:23pm: Louise mentions open line and SMS numbers and the temperature.
5:23pm: Promo for “666 Community Choir” (30 seconds)
5:24pm: Louise runs through the traffic again…same as before, but asks people to ring the 666 open line if they spot a traffic problem, which is a bit counter productive. ATN provide traffic reports to more than just the ABC, and on some other stations people are invited to call them direct, one does have to wonder if the ABC’s busy producers find time to give ATN traffic details that are phoned in.
5:24pm: News headlines with newsreader (I’m not going to try and spell her name) without word stumbles, well done! (1:07)
5:25pm: More promos for upcoming interviews, and time for (quite literally) a chat with Nick Bright from the weather bureau, a couple minutes later they get to the weather, unfortunately it’s a really uninteresting blow by blow description of which wind will cause various types of weather over the next few days, the capital city summary is much better, and then Nick provides the sunrise and sunset times, followed by a braindead statement from Louise “They days are getting shorter aren’t they?”…that should be fairly obvious Louise, happens for this half of the year every year…choice quote from that segment from Louise “You should know not to believe me”.
5:29pm: Promo for “keeping the capital in touch with the country” or something like that (30 Seconds).
5:29pm: Louise promises to play some music this week from The Triffords, babbles about her recent visit to the coast and how she saw birds while she was there…and then her threat comes true and The Triffords start playing…typical ABC Canberra music I’m afraid, not even worth mentioning.
5:33pm: Louise then threatens to play another one of those songs tomorrow…glad I won’t be listening!
5:33pm: The time for another Louise, chief political correspondent in Parliament House Louise Yaxley (spelling?). The two Louises discuss federal politics. Interesting discussion about how few people in the seat of Bennelong actually know who Maxine McKew is, followed by more anti-Hanson chatter, and a replay of something Peter Costello said in question time…if there was a reason for it, I certainly can’t find it.
5:38pm: Time for a “delightful” piece of music from Gary Lewincamp (or something like that)…delightful isn’t quite how I would describe it…how about terminally boring repetitive guitar solo which goes on for about three minutes too long.
5:41pm: News headlines including a whole heap of quotes without attribution (2:11).
5:43pm: Finance report with…wait for it…Commsec! Yes it’s a plug for the Commonwealth Bank on your ABC…ahhh the irony of it all…this gets classified as an ad I’m afraid as the ABC have their own finance reporters and don’t need to use brokers to tell them what’s going on. (1:28)
5:44pm: Promo for “PM” program (43 seconds)
5:45pm: Louise mentions phone number and SMS number, and repeats parts of her opening remarks of the hour.
5:46pm: Interview about world paragliding championships with Godfrey Winness (spelling?)…the peculiar statements from Louise continue, surprised that people from Iceland can paragilde, sadly the topic is interesting but Louise makes no attempt to do anything other than read from a list of questions and force Godfrey to sound like a PR robot.
5:52pm: Louise mentions that she will talk to the creators of the film “Happy Feet” shortly, and launches into another song…something with an untuned guitar and a mumbling singer…does this station hire tone deaf people to choose the playlist?
5:55pm: Not a minute too soon, but a few too late, the song ends and Louise announces that “Happy Feet” winning an Academy Award is “the best news from the Oscars”…and then talks to Greg Smith from animation firm Animal Logic who, not surprisingly, animated the film. It’s really quite funny how Louise doesn’t talk over the top of people she likes…another interview wasted, it was a whole heap of self-praise and “we’ve set the new standard” for Animal Logic…pity really.
5:59pm: Not a pity however is Louise Maher signing off for the night and giving us a 10 second promo for the news, PM and the quiz which follows it.
Statistics
Advertising: 3 minutes and 22 seconds
News: 13 minutes and 16 seconds
Summary News: It is important to note that this is the news bulletins and updates, not the chatter about the news. It was actually quite well balanced, which is much more than I can say for its TV counterpart, lots of detail and quite good. I was a bit concerned about the amount of dead air between stories and after audio clips, and that weird humming noise on some of the reports was very loud and disturbing, not to mention that the weather reports were overly brief and they had a few too many unattributed audio quotes. It was a good effort, but the problems have dragged the score down from what could have been a perfect five. (4)
Talk: Louise Maher has an amazing ability to only ever talk over the top of people she is disagreeing with, and not allow any consideration of ideas which differ from her own. She also seems fairly inept at interviewing anyone on anything outside of politics. The traffic reports fall in to this category as they were never mentioned in a news bulletin and Louise only ever made passing references, and never told people where the queues were building, not to mention there were only two traffic report.
The number of calls and text messages Louise received was fairly indicative of how interesting her program was.
Oddly, it could have been worse…that’s about the only thing that saved Louise from a worse score. (1)
Music: Tone deaf! (0)
Overall: A really bad hour on the ABC I’m afraid…even overly giggly Alex Sloan in the morning (see the informal review) was better than this tripe…the news was really the only thing going for the station. Whilst the average of those scores is closer to 1.5 than 2, I’m willing to give them a 2 simply becuase of the time spent on the decent news service. (2)
This week’s Friday Funny comes from Bearded Clam, apparently somewhere in Japan.
A guy goes into a bar and says, “Quick, gimme a beer before the trouble starts!” The barman looks around the sleepy bar, shrugs and hands the guy a bottle of beer.
The guy drinks it fast. “Quick! gimme another beer before the trouble starts!”
The barman looks at the guy oddly but hands another beer to the guy.
The guy drinks it fast. “Quick another beer before the trouble starts!”
The barman hands him another beer, with a frown on his face, but hands it over reluctantly.
Again, the guy drinks it fast. “Quick another beer before the trouble starts!”
The barman replies, “Look pal, exactly what trouble are you talking about?”
“I haven’t got any money!”
Do you have something you would like to contribute to Friday Funnies? If so, email it to smoothwallsamuel@gmail.com. All contributions welcome!
I’m not entirely sure when it failed or why, but the 2CC computer is not getting to air. It’s just the 2UE feed, silence and the emergency tape.
The ad break on the emergency tape is becoming tedious…I think I prefer the silence (but certainly not “The Sounds Of Silence“).
Oh well, this kind of thing once in a while reminds me that I’m listening to automation…and I don’t really care as long as they either fix the computer or find something other than the emergency tape to fill air time when the breakfast show starts.
The footy season is back, as are my footy tips…now a quick word of warning, before you consider using my tips, you might want to check my past performance, and then try to work out which half of my tips are wrong!
NRL Round 1 Broncos V Cowboys Storm V Tigers Warriors V Eels Sea Eagles V Raiders Sharks V Panthers Knights V Bulldogs Titans V Dragons Roosters V Rabbitohs
It looks like Internet Explorer 6 is experiencing issues displaying this website (thanks to Khay for pointing it out to me). For one reason or another the sidebar is appearing right down the bottom of the page, below the last post…but it’s only happening on the front page. At this stage I see no reason why this is happening as nothing in the sidebar has changed since it last rendered correctly in Internet Explorer.
The good news is that the problem does not occur in Internet Explorer 7 or Mozilla Firefox or Opera or anything else for that matter.
I’ll keep trying to fix it, but I’m no expert in HTML or PHP, so if I have no luck then it will just have to stay like that until the site changes to a new webhost in a couple weeks…the new webhost has a web design team so they will (hopefully) be able to fix it if I can’t.
Despite the fact that I avoid Internet Explorer where possible, the majority of the people visiting this site do use it, so I am treating this as a priority issue. I apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing.
Update 6:31am 16 March 2007: The problem was resolved overnight…not fixed but resolved…details this evening. End Update
One of my favourite cafes in Canberra, Cafe Copenhagen in Westfield Woden is the latest victim of Westfield’s “we bought the shopping centre and you have to renovate” syndrome. They will be closed for three weeks after Easter. Apparently Westfield don’t like the column structure and want it removed, they also don’t like the (rather charming in my view) wooden floor…whether this means they just don’t like that it’s starting to creak or they don’t like the look of it is yet to be determined.
I do hope that the renovations don’t tamper with the look of the cafe too much as it has a certain charm to it at the moment, and it would be a pity if it changed very much.
I do hope that Cafe Copenhagen’s friendly, busy staff enjoy the three week break, and I look forward to seeing them, and enjoying their wonderful coffee, custard tarts, apple slices, quiches and more when they reopen. I’m sure it will all taste even better after not having the option of indulging there for three weeks.
Cafe Copenhagen’s coffee and multitasking whiz, and longest serving employee Alice, with morning and evening assistant Peter.
Or perhaps I should have said “An incompetent message from the ACT Government”.
Saturday the 9th of March 2007 doesn’t exist…you can have Friday the 9th or Saturday the 10th.
“Tow away-fines will be reinforced”. It’s good to see that the Chief Minister is inventing a new dialect of English, pity it doesn’t make any sense. I’d also love to know how you reinforce a fine.
Incidentally, the sign is at the Ainslie Avenue end of Kogarah Lane, a lane which is always filled with parked cars. I wonder where, with all the parking restrictions on nearby streets, the government were expecting the cars to be parked during the mysterious no parking period?
I had a chat with Clive Robertson about this sign and he was quite amused, neither of us think anybody could be fined for parking in the no parking zone, as there is no way to know when the no parking period was.
Last week their anti-virus product came last in a comparison of anti-virus products and failed to achieve accreditation, before that it wasn’t protecting Windows Vista users properly, this week it’s deleting entire mailboxes!
Microsoft has admitted that its Live OneCare security suite has been accidentally deleting some users’ Outlook and Outlook Express e-mails.
According to postings on Microsoft’s OneCare forum, erasures have been caused when the antivirus program finds a virus in an e-mail attachment. Instead of then quarantining that single e-mail, users have reported that entire .pst or .dbx files — the personal folder where non-Exchange Server users’ messages and other details are kept — have been quarantined or, in some cases, even deleted.
One user commented on the forum: “Is there a chance to recover it? If not, OneCare will have done more damage than any virus in my 30 years of active computing.” Forum postings indicate, however, that recovery is possible in some cases, where the .pst or .dbx file is still available in OneCare’s quarantine facility.
Stephen Boots, a forum administrator, commented that he was “very unhappy about this problem as it was reported over a year ago and fixed in the 1.0 release”, adding: “It never appeared throughout the beta, but suddenly appeared when 1.5 was released”.
In a statement reported on Computerworld, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the company was “working to address an issue where the antimalware engine for OneCare is erroneously quarantining Outlook .pst files or Outlook Express .dbx files, when the .pst file or .dbx file contains an infected attachment”. The spokesperson added that a fix would be included in the next OneCare update, which is due on 13 March.
The update might be due out tomorrow, and maybe that will fix the problem, but how exactly did they manage to reintroduce that bug, months after getting rid of it?
More importantly, Microsoft have admitted that OneCare deletes Outlook and Outlook Express mailboxes, but what about other mail clients (Mozilla Thunderbird (my recommended email client) and Eudora for example) that also have to store emails somewhere…if OneCare is deleting the mailboxes of Outlook, surely it can delete the mailboxes of competitors’ email clients, but will Microsoft’s patch prevent that?
A few weeks ago I reported that Dale Sinden and Simon Foster, the two movie buffs of John Kerr’s New Day Australia now have their own show on Sundays between 6pm and 8pm, I also commented that the catalyst for the new show was the departure of former 2UE presenter Mike Williams who was apparently unsatisfied with his remuneration…whilst that may be the case, 2UE want to paint a different picture, as this extract from The Sydney Morning Herald explains:
Film recruits
When 2UE programmer Greg Byrnes was driving around after midnight a few weeks ago trying to settle his crying baby twins, he happened to hear overnight presenter John Kerr’s regular segment with movie buffs Dale Sinden and Simon Foster. Byrne was so impressed that he has now given the pair their own two-hour show on Sundays to discuss film. Sunday Night at the Movies is heard from 6 to 8pm and features new releases, DVD reviews, film trivia, a cult corner and soundtracks. The pair replace Mike Williams in the slot. Now Byrne just has to solve the problem of getting his children to sleep through the night.
May I suggest that instead of sleeping during the night, they gather logical thoughts from Clive Robertson? Oh…err actually no, that’s my bad habit…in fact when I rang Clive early this morning, his producer Abe suggested that I should really have been asleep.
Anyway, whatever the story is, a big congratulations to Dale and Simon, they are doing a great job, their show is quite possibly one of the busiest shows on 2UE and is an awful lot of fun. Needless to say, it is an awful lot better than the four hours of Sharina’s Psychic Boredom which follows them.
(4)
