Posts filed under 'Bizarreness'
Only Canberra could produce a headline like that, and it is all true, even if slightly exagerated.
This afternoon on my way into Civic I noticed somebody staring at a No Right Turn sign, which was a rather unusual sight. There didn’t appear to be anything unusual about the sign…maybe they hadn’t seen one before.
Also this afternoon, an explosion at the Australian National University.
In the Research School Of Chemistry, probably the result of an experimental accident.
ABC Online says “A laboratory explosion blew out three windows and sparked a fire at the Australian National University’s (ANU) science building this afternoon. The fire is understood to have burned through the roof of the building. It is not clear what caused the explosion, which hit the third floor of the science building at 1:45pm AEST. Ambulance officers assessed four people from nearby buildings but they did not need treatment. The fire brigade says smoke from the blaze was non-toxic. Investigations into the cause are under way, as the clean-up continues.”
This comes just two days after a suspicious package was found at the Jolimont Centre in Civic, sparking a closure of some roads, including Nourthbourne Ave. The police belw up this bag to destroy it, I’m not sure how safe this is when they don’t know what is in the bag, but it turned out to be a forgotten bag of clothing.
Samuel
August 5th, 2005 at 07:40pm
In case you don’t already know, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service have told us all that we are out of whack with the sun and need a leap second, so that means we will have an extra second this year, right at the end of the year, which probably means that nobody will know when the new year actually begins, and all those annual “One second past midnight” arguments could turn into “one second past the second midnight”.
The US Government want to eliminate leap seconds and just have a leap hour every 300-500 years (WTF?), I think that would be very confusing for most people. It’s already hard enough for people to comprehend daylight savings time, let alone an extra hour in the middle.
Leap seconds have caused problems in the past though, one of the most infamous instances was Motorola GPS sytems informing their users that the time was “half past 62 o’clock”…I bet they were confused out of their brains….
“Honey, I thought a leap second was only supposed to go for a second”
“It is”
“But the clock says it’s half past 62”
“Does that mean that it’s today or tommorow?”
“I think it’s the next day, we better go to bed”
Samuel
July 31st, 2005 at 06:51pm
With the extended absence of Paul Vautin due to an injury, Ray Hadley will make a return to Channel Nine’s NRL Footy Show with a guest appearance.
It will be good to have somebody who knows what he is talking about on the Footy Show again, but in my opinion, they should scrap the existing Footy Show and replace it with a new version with the people from 2GB’s Continuous Call Team. It would be much more entertaining and would actually have meaningful discussions about football for a change.
Samuel
July 28th, 2005 at 04:32pm
The recent comment spam has now officially been entered in the Plain English Campaign‘s Golden Bull Awards.
I received an email from Tony Maher, General Manager of the Plain English Campaign a few hours ago in which he wrote:
I will certainly enter this into our ‘Golden Bull’ awards for you.
Exactly what the author was trying to achieve is beyond me.
Well Tony, it is beyond me too!
Incidentally, I wrote the comment spammer an email in which I said:
For some strange reason, I almost find your comment amusing
He replied with:
Thanks Samuel…
Howdy
(His/Her Website which doesn’t deserve a mention)
Please note: message attached
But there were no attatchments, so I suspect that this person is possibly from another planet, or at least trying to appear that way.
I regularly receive Plain English Campaign newsletters and follow their awards closely, so I will attempt to keep you informed.
Samuel
July 25th, 2005 at 11:48pm
2CC’s Mike Welsh had an interview with someone from the Museum of Particularly Bad Art about their Itchyball Prize, which seemed so interesting that I thought I would mention it.
Basically, all you have to do is send them your bad artwork and the one they judge as the worst wins $2000. I have plenty of pictures I have drawn over the years that I could enter, but they require the original, and I don’t like to part with my art.
None the less, it is rather interesting and the end result should also be interesting.
I doubt that I will submit any of my artwork, but I might run a series of “Samuel’s Art” specials right here on my blog.
Samuel
July 18th, 2005 at 11:00pm
The Canberra Theatre Centre and Hutchison Entertainment (advertising at 7:30pm on Prime TV) are bringing Romeo & Juliet to Canberra…but there is an interesting twist to this version….I’ll let the Canberra Theatre Company say it: “featuring the most captivating and sensual nude scenes ever presented on a ballet stage.”
It must be the night of the nudists because SBS World News had some “lots of naked people running” thing as their top story, and then had an encore performance at the end of the news while they filled the remaining 30 seconds or so. I suppose that it is SBS, and nudity is no stranger to SBS, but Prime running an ad for nudity at 7:30?
The Canberra Theatre Company have some interesting seating arrangements for this nude play
Babies under 3 years of age can sit on their parent’s lap
FULL PRICE $79.90
PENSION – AGED / INVALID $69.90
GROUPS 10+ $69.90
SECONDARY STUDENT $69.90
I would have expected this to be in Fyshwick or Mitchell, but alas, it isn’t….not that it matters.
Samuel
July 18th, 2005 at 08:17pm
I got my new ACTION School Term bus ticket yesterday, which will be used for term three.
If the ACTION School Term bus tickets’ serial numbers are issued & printed in order then my new term ticket is the 2297th term ticket issued since the last one I got.
By now you probably think I am completely out of my mind, why do I care and why did I bother to check?…well, I’m glad you asked!
I was sitting down in the lounge room and noticed that my new term ticket was on the seat next to me, as was my St. George Bank card holder (which holds my bus ticket), and so I thought that it would be a good time to take out the old one and put in the new one. At that stage I noticed a similarity, the serial number both started the same way and seemed to have a lot of numbers in common (I gathered that from a quick glance at them near each other), this made me think “How similar are these numbers?” and so I checked.
The old ticket has serial number 05 -270704- 02522
The new ticket has serial number 05 -270704- 04819 which make my new ticket the 2297th ACTION Term Ticket issued since my last ticket.
ACTION School Term bus tickets sell for $55 which means that ACTION have made $126,335 in term tickets sales since my last term ticket.
Now, my new ticket goes into my card holder, and my old ticket goes into my bus ticket collection. (It is a bigish collection, it contains most of my bus tickets from the last 5-10 years.) Actually, to be more precise, the collection has a main pile of credit card size reusable* bus tickets, and a seperate collection of small paper single ride only tickets.
*Reusable tickets are only reusable as per the terms of purchase
Samuel
July 8th, 2005 at 09:59pm
There were plenty of instances of stupidity in the last 24 hours, but one in particular takes the cake. Near where I live there is a large communal rubbish hopper, somebody in their infinite wisdom decided that the best orientation for this was on it’s back. How they managed this I will never know, what I do know however is that the hopper was more or less full at the time and as such has now left a rather unholy mess.
I was going to take a photo or two of it, but before I had the chance the rubbish truck company (I think it is Cleanaway) came and returned the bin to a more natural orientation. They did however omit to clean up the mess and move the bin back a metre to it’s normal location.
The bin is now roughly a metre forward of it’s usual undercover location (bin now subject to rainfill) and has an incredible mess behind it.
I must remember to take the digital camera out to photograph this absurd mess tommorow (erm, today)…stay tuned for the photos.
Samuel
July 6th, 2005 at 12:42am
While fixing a computer last night, I got quite a scare when the computer stopped booting. I could see the Windows 98 splash screen, but it just stopped on that. It wouldn’t boot from the HDD, the floppy drive or the CD drive. After a lot of pulling my hair out I discovered that it seemed to stop around the time it wanted to check the HDD, which didn’t make sense as the HDD was fine.
After a lot more hair pulling and tugging I decided to have a look at the BIOS power saving, it was on, which isn’t an issue as such, but after I turned it off, the computer booted properly. On further investigation I have discovered that the power saving went nuts and turned off the HDD when it was in use…great fun.
Now, if you have power saving turned on, I have to ask you why.
When your hard drive is on, it is spinning, and the heads are being held aloft over the magnetic surface of the HDD by the air cushion created by the spinning, your HDD also has a landing zone for the heads, the reason it has this is that when the Hard Drive slows down and the air cushion disappears, the heads crash land on the hard drive and drag for a little while…the same thing happens in reverse when the hard drive starts up again, the heads drag for a while until the air cushion builds up. The landing zone creates a safe area for the heads to crash and drag.
The more you turn your HDD on and off, the more damage you do to the heads, and if they don’t hit the landing zone, the data on your HDD. Your HDD doesn’t use much power…in fact, an absolutely minimal amount. You would be well advised to leave your HDD running when you computer is running as it creates less wear and tear on the heads, the magnetic surface and the motor. It also provides faster access times.
The only decent reason for using power saving on your HDD is if you are running a laptop on batteries, otherwise, turn off power saving.
Samuel
June 17th, 2005 at 02:18pm
This photo appeared on the ActewAGL webcams at 11:10am 8th May 2004, it appears to be a giant fish attacking the National Museum.
OK, well maybe it wasn’t a fish…the picture from 10 minutes beforehand shows that it was just a flag….but I like the fish tale.
Samuel
June 13th, 2005 at 07:33pm
It seems that I run into crazy people almost every day, on Friday while I was sitting down listening to the radio a woman passed by me and stared at me the entire time she was walking past, in fact, I would go so far as to say she was gawping at me, or as answers.com puts it “look with amazement; look stupidly”
Oddly enough, it happened again later that day as well…I can’t find any reason for this gawping, unless I my head had momentarily turned bright orange with lime green polka dots…which it didn’t.
Strange strange people.
Samuel
June 5th, 2005 at 09:14pm
I saw an interesting ad on TV not long ago. The people at Country Energy “It’s your country” have informed us that “Gas & Electricity go together”….what a good idea!
As they say in the classics, “It’s more bang for your buck.”
Disclaimer: If you blow yourself up by mixing gas and electricity you can’t blame me, but you can blame Country Energy.
Samuel
June 1st, 2005 at 06:38pm
I received an email from a friend and colleague today, here is a “most of email” extract:
I applied for BETA testing for MS, which is pretty good, coz then i get free stuff (good thing number 1), they accepted my application, and will be sending me stuff when ever the next beta thing is out.
I also got my hands on a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, Billy Gates is sending that to me soon…….
finally ms are doing something half decent lol
Now, I’m confused, Most Microsoft software is annoying enough, and most Beta software has a few bizzare quirks, but put these together as Microsoft Beta’s…Yuck!
I can’t share my colleague’s entusiasm on this topic, and certainly will not be using any beta Microsoft software from him unless I am certain it doesn’t have the usual mix of bugs, quirks and crashy bits that come from that horrid combination.
Samuel
June 1st, 2005 at 05:23pm
ACTEW Corporation are planning on creating electricity from effluent leaving their waste water treatment plant, the power generated will be used to power the Lower Molongolo treatment plant, which uses roughly the same amount of power as 240 homes.
Samuel
May 22nd, 2005 at 12:06am
An update on the previous See you at Mike’s dinner post.
Unfortunately, the insurance company who are insuring the event are insisting that nobody under the age of 18 attends. This is the same insurance company that insisted on having me get a parental note to fly in the 2CC Traffic Plane despite the fact I’ll be over 18 by that time because they are convinced everyone wants to hijack and crash planes….
Incidentally, the dinner will be exactly one week before my 18th birthday.
I do have to wonder why I was able to enter the competition in the first place….
Samuel
May 20th, 2005 at 10:22pm
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This afternoon on my way into Civic I noticed somebody staring at a No Right Turn sign, which was a rather unusual sight. There didn’t appear to be anything unusual about the sign…maybe they hadn’t seen one before.