Archive for July 4th, 2008

Fine, I’ll post it here instead

Twitter is down for scheduled maintenance at the moment and I’m not waiting for nine hours just to make a quick remark.

The cheque’s in the mail! The ACT government are giving me a whole $11 for cancelling my car’s rego. Very desperate to get me off the road!

Apparently I can get a little bit more from the NRMA as they will refund the unused CTP component, but is it really worth my time to stand in line at an NRMA shopfront just to get another dozen dollars when I have already wasted half a morning at an ACT government shopfront?

It makes me wonder why the ACT government can collect money for the NRMA when you pay for vehicle registration, but they can’t refund it when you cancel registration. Seems like bureaucratic “make life harder for the people so they won’t try to get money from us” red tape to me.

If it were like New South Wales and we had a choice of CTP provider then it would make sense to claim a refund from the provider, but when the ACT government are enforcing a monopoly and are seemingly in cahoots with their provider of choice, surely it’s not too much to ask for both amounts to be refunded in one go.

Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that I was already in Dickson to see my doctor and I had to hand in the number plates at the government shopfront, I would think that spending half my morning being brainwashed by the annoying loop of ACT government advertisements on display at the shopfront, only to receive $11 after having paid the ACT government $6.60 for my transport for the day, would be a complete waste of time.

$11 in exchange for the remaining two months of rego…wouldn’t it be nice if vehicle registration only cost $5.50 per month. We might all be able to afford petrol then.

Samuel

July 4th, 2008 at 11:35am

Clive Robertson and The Weather

People who listened to Clive Robertson when he was presenting New Day Australia on 2UE would probably remember his weather updates which would start shortly after the news, often turn in to a story about something, and end about twenty minutes later. Clive had an amazing ability to take the most mundane of daily information, and turn it in to something interesting to listen to every hour.

It would appear that back on the 13th of March 1989, Clive treated the weather to his unusual presentation style on Seven Nightly News, hosted at the time by Roger Climpson and Ann Sanders. I’m fairly sure that, if they didn’t have a story to run after the weather, Clive could have continued with the weather until Derryn Hinch’s show began.

It’s Friday, and it’s about time that the Friday Funnies made a comeback, so if you have a joke or a funny video that you’d like to see here on a Friday, send an email to samuel@samuelgordonstewart.com and it might just appear in the coming weeks.

Samuel

1 comment July 4th, 2008 at 10:29am

New website on the way for 2CC

I could turn in to A Current Affair here and claim to have “exclusive, behind the scenes, never before seen by the public, pictures” but to be fair, anybody who has landed on this website in the last few hours by searching Google for:

mike welsh “ben fordham”

(and a handful of people have done just that) could have seen it, as the fourth result on Google at the time of writing this is for a page of the new, yet to be released, website.

It’s almost an annual tradition for 2CC to launch a new website, and so often they seem to release a seemingly circa 1995 static HTML website, thankfully this time around it looks like they’re actually using a content management system, and have a dynamic database-driven website which they might actually manage to maintain for more than a couple weeks. I’ve got to say, the new website looks pretty impressive.
New 2CC Website

At long last they have a “Now, next, later, then” system and some useful information about the station on the homepage. It’s certainly a vast improvement over the current website:
Old 2CC Website

Having had a look around the website, it’s clear that there are a few bits of content that need to be modified before the website can go live, such as open line numbers, email addresses, the fact that you need to prefix text messages with “2cc” etc, but overall the website is quite impressive and seems to suit the image the station is trying to portray.

It’s also good to see that, unlike the current website, 2CC have taken new photos of their staff and are no longer relying on the existing photos which are at least four or five years old.
Each presenter now has a readable page, unlike the previous “one solid block of text each” site, and although it’s not visible within the screenshots, each page has a comprehensive summary of regular guests and segments:
New 2CC Website
New 2CC Website
New 2CC Website

Even the newsroom get their own page (although I do recall an old version of their website containing a picture of James Goodwin when he was their afternoon newsreader).
New 2CC Website

It looks like 2CC have also managed to source the staff photos from 2UE which were used as the basis for the photos on the 2UE website (although the versions on the 2UE website mostly contain a modified background)
New 2CC Website

Unfortunately there is no sign of online streaming, so it looks like that’s probably not happening. I have reason to believe that the website will be launched in conjunction with a very noticeable and (I would consider it) major change to the station…unfortunately I’m not allowed to tell you about that just yet (you hear things inside buildings that sometimes you just have to keep secret) but suffice to say, I’m making some recordings for before and after comparison.

When will the new website be launched? Well that’s anyone’s guess. I’m not going to post a link to it in its pre-launch state. If you’re really desperate to have a look, then you already have enough information to find it yourself.

The amusing thing is, whoever is developing the site could very easily have locked access down to a few select IP addresses or password protected it. Even a simple robots.txt file would have stopped Google from indexing it…clearly they weren’t too concerned about “sneak peeks”, which for me at least is probably a good thing, because I’ve been trying to work out what they’re doing with their website for a while now…they haven’t been attempting to update the old one for ages, and the new one explains why. Mystery solved, and my head can go back to working on the 15 million other mysteries I seem to ponder at any given time.

Samuel

1 comment July 4th, 2008 at 02:45am


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