Posts filed under 'Canberra Stories'
Hello to everyone who is landing here today for details on the Canberra A380 flyover. The details are in the post below this one, however I will outline my plans for coverage of this event today.
Around 1PM the plane is scheduled to take off from Sydney Airport, I will be monitoring the media for information about any delays. If there are delays I will inform you, otherwise I will be heading to the top of Mount Ainslie.
1:45 (or whatever time it gets here): A380 will be over Canberra and I will get some photos, if time, weather and flyover route permits, I will also get some video of the plane.
After this I will come back here and post whatever photos and video I have of the flyover.
Samuel
June 7th, 2007 at 11:34am
Apparently the enormous Airbus a380 will fly over Canberra at an altitude of 5000 feet today. I’m not currently sure what time this will happen, but I will be sure to have the camera ready.
Update: Looks like the A380 will leave Sydney around 1pm for its flight to Canberra and back. I’m still pursuing details of the Canberra flyover. End Update
Further Update: With thanks to Qantas Corporate Communications I can inform you that the A380 will fly over Canberra at an altitude of approximately 5000 feet (1524 metres), around 1:45 this afternoon. This will occur after the A380 flies over Sydney Harbour at about 3000 feet around 1:15pm. The plane isn’t scheduled to land in Sydney until 3pm, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the A380 does a couple laps of Canberra.
Approximately 200 Qantas corporate customers, frequent flyers, media representatives and staff will be the lucky people to go down in history as the passengers on the first flight by the Airbus A380 to carry passengers in Australia. I’ll wave to them, I wonder if they will wave back?
Many thanks to Qantas for their quick response to my request for information. End Update
10:20am Update: Obviously this story is a high priority for me today! I’ve been informed by someone in the know that the aviation industry is experiencing some delays in Sydney today due to the weather. No word on whether that will affect the A380 flight, however I’m sure the media will be sure to tell us if it is late leaving Sydney. End Update
Samuel
June 7th, 2007 at 06:27am
It amazes me how long this story has taken to reach fruition. I was first alerted to this story at the end of February by a former work colleague, however I wasn’t sure of my own non-disclosure obligations from when I worked for Telstra through a casual employment agency last year. So, rather than making a public announcement at the time, I filled a few local media people in on the details. Nothing much happened on this story for a while so I didn’t continue to pursue it.
Yesterday the story rocketed back in to life when Telstra announced that they are going to close 13 call centres across the country. (Telstra press release) (Article on news.com.au)
Details of what is actually happening in Canberra are scarce, but 2CC news are reporting that Telstra are claiming 35 jobs will be lost in Canberra. The reality of it is that 75-80 jobs will be lost in Canberra as Telstra are only counting permanent staff, not the staff employed on a casual basis by third parties, which in Canberra means the staff employed by Julia Ross Hot.
Telstra have decided that they don’t want any call centres with less than 200 employees, unfortunately the Canberra Broadband Helpdesk, one of three in the country, and one of two to be closed, employs about 75 people.
This is not Bigpond support which is contracted out to Teletech, but instead is the wholesale line fault division. The basic role of these staff is to log faults reported by ISPs and schedule technicians to attend to and fix the problems, these staff also run tests for technicians, allocate new resources (exchange ports etc) to fix problems, and escalate issues which are more complex and require phone lines or other equipment to be replaced.
The three call centres often struggle under the load as it is, there is no way known that Brisbane can handle the load, which means problems are going to take longer to fix as it will take longer for appointments to be arranged, technicians will spend more time on hold waiting for tests (therefore getting through less jobs each day…and getting paid less now that most of them are contractors paid on a per-job basis), and followups will be almost non-existent.
If you think the need for these call centres is offset by the number of people who are now on DSLAMs (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexers) owned and operated by ISPs other than Telstra, think again. The only thing this does is change who maintains the exchange equipment…there is still a big heap of copper wire owned and operated by Telstra, and this tends to have more issues than exchange equipment. The impact of ISPs running their own DSLAMs on the workloads of these call centres is minimal, although it does increase the buck-passing a bit.
Conveniently for Telstra, the closures tie in with an asset consolidation they are in the middle of. For Canberra, this means the two buildings they own on Northbourne Avenue (the one with their logo, and the little one next door) will be sold. The staff who aren’t losing their jobs will be moving to a new building in Symonston before the end of the year.
The information I have is that, if probed too deeply about the local job cuts, Telstra will unfairly blame the ACT government. Apparently they were in “negotiations” with the government earlier this year for office space in Civic (a commodity the government don’t have at their disposal), in exchange for a guarantee about the number of staff Telstra would employ. The negotiations, which were never really serious, went nowhere, but telstra may use the ACT Government as a scapegoat if the pressure gets a bit too much for them locally.
Incidentally, if you have noticed a thing that looks a bit like a phone tower on the roof of Telstra’s taller building in Dickson, don’t be too concerned about it. Telstra’s actual phone tower is further down Antill Street, at the back of the swimming pool carpark, roughly between the tennis courts, putt putt golf centre, and storm water drain. The thing on the Telstra building’s roof has nothing to do with mobile phones.
Samuel
June 6th, 2007 at 07:17am
It’s taken an awfully long time, a failed format change and an unfortunate failure of their AFL coverage, for 2CA to realise that in order to get people to know that you exist, you have to tell them that you exist.
2CA have launched a competition in conjunction with The Canberra Times to find “The Best Songs Of All Time”. Admittedly the list will be skewed towards 2CA’s target demographic and be more likely to feature older songs than newer songs, but for my taste in music that is a good thing, and we’ve already got plenty of lists skewed towards newer music on some of the more youth focussed FM stations.
The final list will be published in The Canberra Times on Thursday, and counted down across the upcoming long weekend.
Sadly some people just can’t accept that not everything is aimed at them, and even whinge about them after leaving town. It seems that Capital Radio Network hater Johnboy from The RiotACT can’t even ignore The Canberra Times or 2CA now that he is hundreds of kilometres away. Instead he is trying to sabotage the entire promotion by getting as many people as possible to submit a vote for a band that very few people have ever heard of, it might be a good band, but the fact of the matter is that most people have never heard of them, which is a stark comparison to the bands 2CA will be likely to feature.
I’m no fan of the local ABC radio station, or the music they generally play, but if they were to run a similar competition I certainly wouldn’t try to sabotage it…I would ignore it as much as possible and probably mumble about it under my breath…but there is no way I would try to sabotage it…but then again, I don’t post when I’m drunk.
Back to 2CA for a moment though, it’s good to see them advertising their product again, hopefully they will continue to do so as they are, in my opinion, an awful lot better than their nearest rival station, Mix 106.3. I’m glad that more people will have the opportunity to experience it now that they have been alerted to the presence of 2CA.
And for those of you who are wondering, 2CA are 1053 on the AM dial.
Samuel
June 4th, 2007 at 06:26am
I’ve had five people email me this story, and a further half a dozen point me towards RiotACT’s coverage of the story (where they somehow manage to link it in with the really old news about Bert’s Family Feud being cancelled), so thank you to you all, but you may now desist.
It’s not terribly exciting news but it is interesting to note that Peter Leonard has not retired, but has instead returned from a lengthy and well deserved break. Jessica Good, who, for the most part, did a good job filling in for Peter, has now returned to the weather.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that I am currently working during both WIN News bulletins, I did not see it.
I do have a question for anyone who was watching it on Friday though. Phil Small was hosting 2CC’s coverage of the Raiders V Dragons match at Canberra Stadium on Friday night…was he presenting the sport on Win News on Friday? If so then that was either a pre-recorded segment, or some very nifty work to get between venues, and find parking, so quickly.
Samuel
May 29th, 2007 at 10:12am
Fresh from his appearance on a rather peculiar beat-up of a story on Media Watch earlier this week, Stuart Bocking is the latest 2UE based presenter to get a 2CC promo.
It’s great to see 2CC putting in the time and effort to promote their programs as I’m sure there are plenty of people who tune in for one show and ignore the rest, and it’s good to see 2CC finally recognising that.
The logical next step, and one they may undertake closer to the next ratings period, is promote their programs in other media. One does have to wonder if we will see a few ads here and there on commercial television for 2CC. It would be quite a stretch from the usual budget, but would be a good idea, especially during news and current affairs programming.
Update: Add Sharina’s Psychic Boredom to that list. Looks like 2CC aren’t sparing any show from the promo extravaganza. End Update
Samuel
May 24th, 2007 at 02:42pm
As I write this, relatively popular local website The RiotACT is offline. Normally a website going down for a while wouldn’t be even remotely worthy of me posting it here as a news story of any significance unless there were special circumstances applying to the site, however in this case it is newsworthy because a similar thing happened yesterday.
I didn’t actually notice RiotACT go offline yesterday as I spent a few hours in the morning getting Samuel’s Persiflage online, slept most of the day, woke up, had something to eat, and went to work. However when I went to check RiotACT I noticed that there was a short message from site admin Johnboy mentioning that the site had been offline for a while due to a database issue, the site had been restored from a backup, and most things from that day had been lost.
This morning RiotACT is down again, and whilst I didn’t see what happened yesterday and therefore can’t compare the two incidents, I can say that it really doesn’t look like a database issue this time, as visiting the RiotACT home page prompts me to download a file, which turns out to be the WordPress standard index.php file:
<?php
/* Short and sweet */
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, true);
require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
?>
Visiting any direct links to articles, which in theory should direct your request to index.php for processing via an Apache mod_rewrite rule, is returning a completely blank page…no headers, no nothing!
It will be interesting to see what explanation is provided if and when RiotACT is brought back to life this time.
Update: Apparently this time they were offline due to a botched upgrade. End Update
Samuel
May 24th, 2007 at 03:42am
Thanks to IBN News for alerting me to this story (it’s a good thing I still have that Google alert for Dickson College!).
There was a fire in a classroom at about 12:40pm on Tuesday at Dickson College. Police are calling the fire “suspicious”. According to ACT Police about 600 students were evacuated, and a teacher hurt her foot during the evacuation. As a police investigation is currently underway, I will reserve my comments on this particular fire for another date.
I have fond memories of the strange activities that they liked to call fire drills when I was a student at Dickson College though. I remember one in particular where everyone was evacuated in a semi-chaotic manner…once outside, nobody quite knew how far away from the building everyone was supposed to be. At first all the students were able to go virtually anywhere they wanted to, then an exclusion zone of about twenty metres was setup around the front office, followed by a fire brigade official telling the then-deputy principal that the students were too close to the building…so they moved us closer to another one instead. Nobody had the faintest clue what was going on, not even the people who organised the drill.
The only other times I can remember the fire alarm ever going off at Dickson College is when the alarm actually thought something was wrong, it was rarely ever right, but it did happen often enough to remove any real need for fire drills.
People who have been reading this blog for a long time would remember that when I was a student at Dickson College I was also an employee there, and I clearly remember working in the tiny LOTE (Languages Other Than English) computer lab in the morning during one of the school holidays. I was busy working when the fire alarm went off. I did a quick check of my surroundings and could see and smell no smoke or fire, so I got my things together so that I could quickly evacuate if I needed to, and continued working.
The fire alarm at Dickson was separated in to two components, one was the “user friendly” control panel which certain staff had access to, the other was the actual fire detection system which the Fire Brigade has access to. The “user friendly” system was used for the emergency intercom system and basic control of the alert and evacuate tones. Standard procedure was usually for the registrar to open this, make an announcement that the alarm is being investigated, and silence the alarm while investigations were carried out.
On this particular day there was no announcement and there was no silencing, so ten minutes in to the alarm, the automated evacuation program kicked in…an endless loop of an American voice saying “Please proceed to the nearest exit and evacuate in an orderly manner” twice, followed by a few cycle of the evacuation “whoop whoop” tone.
There was still no sign of smoke or fire, and by this stage it was quite clear that I may have been the only staff member in the building as the alarm automatically gets silenced when the door on the “user friendly” alarm control system gets opened, so I picked up my things and quickly walked towards the front office. When I got there I saw the registrar battling with the door on the control system which appeared to be jammed…she informed me that the fire was non-existent, and the alarm had been set off by tradesmen removing asbestos from the art building. I waited with her in the front office until the official all clear was given by the Fire Brigade, after which I went back to work.
Later on in the day when I saw my Indian boss, the head of the IT department, again I asked him where he was during the alarm…amazingly, despite an alarm speaker being situated right outside his office, and the smoke doors in the same area automatically closing quite noisily, he told me that he wasn’t aware that the alarm had gone off. He had been sitting in his office working, wondering what the noise was…even the automated evacuation alarm wasn’t enough for him to consider that something may have been wrong…but then again, he wasn’t particularly bright. He has improved since, and even has IT qualifications now (he had a horticulture degree or something at the time).
Samuel
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:36pm
About a week ago whilst listening to 2CC I had the immense pleasure of hearing a promo for their afternoon show, Afternoons with John Stanley. It was one of their short pre-news promos, but it pleased me immensely as it is, as far as I can recall, the first time they have ever had promos for the afternoon show.
Later on I heard some full-length promos for John Stanley’s show. 2CC are using the same promos as 2UE for John Stanley’s program, with their own station ID tacked on the end.
These promos are long overdue in my opinion, and I am very pleased that 2CC have decided to run them.
Also, 2CC have started running promos for the upcoming drive show with Mike Welsh during John Stanley’s show, this is a great idea as previously the first chance anybody had to find out what was planned for the drive show was after it had already started.
In the last Canberra ratings 2CC’s drive show gained 0.5 of a ratings point to reach 5.8% of the available audience, and logic would say that this kind of promotional activity should bring in more listeners who may have otherwise switched off at the end of John Stanley’s show, which can only be a good thing.
Incidentally, in the Canberra ratings, The Mike Jeffreys Breakfast Show also gained .5 of a ratings point, to claim 9.5% of the available audience.
Samuel
May 21st, 2007 at 02:53pm
Two Canberra Raiders NRL players have been suspended pending a police investigation into a pursuit through Bruce last night.
According to AAP, Todd Carney and Steve Irwin are the suspended players.
ACT Police say a 20-year-old man handed himself into the City Police Station last night, and faces three charges including failing to stop when directed by police, negligent driving and driving whilst disqualified.
Whilst AAP, the Raiders, ACT Police and the NRL have failed to name the twenty year old, it is clear from the Raiders website that Todd Carney is twenty years old, and Steve Irwin is twenty-three.
As there is an ongoing police investigation here, comments will not be allowed on this post, and I remind you that the traffic offences are only alleged at this stage.
Thanks to 2GB’s Continuous Call Team via 2CC for the tip-off.
Update 3:52pm: Added link to public version of AAP article. End Update
Samuel
May 19th, 2007 at 02:53pm
It’s a glorious day today, for the Brumbies are not in the Super 14 Rugby finals. Despite having lived in Canberra all my life, I do not support the local side, in fact I can’t stand them. I’m a Canterbury Crusaders fan (that’s a short but interesting story that I’ll get to in a minute), and despite not following the Super 14 all that closely, I can honestly say that I am very pleased with the way the premiership season has ended.
The Brumbies needed a few things to go their way to get in to the finals. They needed to defeat the Highlanders, which they did 29 points to 10, but they also needed a rather large victory by last placed Queensland Reds over the Bulls. The match got under way at around 3am Canberra time, and before long it was obvious that the Bulls were going to easily win the match and rub the Brumbies out of the finals. The Bulls did so in style, convincingly thrashing the Reds 92 points to three. A perfect way to end the Brumbies’ season from distant Pretoria, South Africa in my opinion.
Also interesting (and good for the team involved) is the news that the Sharks are the first ever South African team to finish on top of the ladder in the Super 14. Admittedly the Super 14 hasn’t been going for all that long, but it’s an important record which will be carried with pride by the Sharks.
The finals consist of the Sharks, Bulls, Crusaders and Blues, which means that no Australian team is in the finals.
Now, the story about why I follow the Crusaders…it dates back to when my age could still be expressed in single digits, I was about three or four at the time when Dad asked me who I wanted to follow in the AFL, after listening to a list of teams I picked out the Bulldogs (then Footscray, now Western), and subsequently chose the same team mascot in the Rugby League, effectively choosing the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs. Moving on to when I was about seven or eight years old, it was a Sunday night and National Nine News was on the television, and they were reporting on the Rugby Union results, they said that Canterbury had won, I latched on to the name thinking that it was the same area as the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, and despite it not being the same area, and instead being across the Tasman Sea, the name stuck and I have followed them ever since.
This could be why I despise the Brumbies so much…they are the local team and the local media treat them with some bias, and it is something peculiar about Canberra that we have so few local teams that they all get treated with some favourable bias, but I think the Brumbies are a special case. In the NRL the Raiders get some favourable bias, but the media tend to accept that a lot of Canberrans don’t give two hoots about the Raiders and support other teams, however the Brumbies, being one of only two teams within hundreds of kilometres, get treated like they are the entire competition (RiotACT provide roughly the same amount of Brumbies bias as the rest of the local media, see the linked article for an example), they are an annoying waste of excess media time in this town, and I for one just can’t stand them. The news that a thrashing of another team many thousands of kilometres away has directly affected and destroyed their hopes of a finals berth has made my day, and possibly my week!
Samuel
May 6th, 2007 at 11:42am
Hooray! For some inexplicable reason Channel Ten are doing two fantastic things tonight. Firstly, they are broadcasting a Saturday night AFL match live rather than on delay, and secondly, they aren’t using their horrible commentary team.
For some reason they are rebroadcasting Fox Sport’s coverage of the Kangaroos V Swans instead of using their own commentary team. Fox do a much better job than Ten, their graphics are better, the camera work is better, and best of all the commentary team is better.
And as a bonus for the Canberra based AFL fans who enjoyed 3AW’s brilliant AFL coverage for the last two years before 2CA canned it, 3AW’s Clinton Grybas is the lead commentator for Fox on Saturday night.
For once I can actually sit down and enjoy a match being broadcast by Channel Ten…they should consider sub-contracting all of their coverage out to Fox Sport!
Samuel
May 5th, 2007 at 07:36pm
Back in March I reported that Cafe Copenhagen in Westfield Woden was closing for renovations at the behest of Westfield management.
I’m pleased to be able to report that it is now open again after an $83,000 renovation, however I’m not so pleased to report that I don’t like the result of the renovation.
I’ll add it to my list of articles which need photos and report back when I have the photos for you to compare the old and new Copenhagen for yourself.
Samuel
May 2nd, 2007 at 06:39pm
Today was Sarah Robinson’s (half of Breakfast with Chris and Sarah) last day at FM 104.7. The new breakfast show is called “The C Team” and is hosted by Scotty and Nige who have up until now been doing other shifts, and filling in on the breakfast show over Christmas.
I do find it interesting that somebody suspected of trying to defame an ex-2CC manager on this site has taken over one of the other weekday shifts. I’m not going to name them, but they know who they are.
Samuel
May 1st, 2007 at 05:42pm
Congratulations to Capital Radio’s Duncan McCrea (Update: Spelling corrected, sorry Duncan) who yesterday had his first (as far as I can recall) hosting gig on 2CC. Duncan did what Kris Mckenzie would have done before he left, and filled in for Mike Welsh on the drive show. The show only went for an hour and was probably on par with the first hour of Peter Higgins on 2UE’s middawn program on Friday morning. Both of them are pretty much new to hosting talkback, and Peter was sounding pretty good by about the third hour, I wouldn’t be surprised if Duncan puts in an even better performance next time he fills in.
For those of you wondering, last time I checked Duncan was the local panel operator for the John Laws Morning Show, and occasionally works in the Capital Radio newsroom. He previously worked for the now defunct Radio2.
Over at FM 104.7, Sarah Robinson, part of the “Chris and Sarah for Breakfast” program, is leaving the station at the end of the show on May the 1st (Tuesday next week). Mason Edwards left the breakfast show at the end of last year for sister station NXFM in Newcastle, leaving Chris Welldon and Sarah behind. A replacement show will be announced shortly, and Chris will remain with the station.
Samuel
April 26th, 2007 at 11:13am
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