Beer vs. Petrol

I can buy a schooner of the same local beer at two different pubs, one down the road from each other. Whilst different in design, layout and food offering, both pubs are pretty much the same and the identical beer is poured into an identical glass and served at the same temperature at both venues. Each venue charges a different price for the beer and during the week, the price fluctuates depending on the day, and even depending on the time of day.

That’s beer. The same thing happens to a lettuce, a loaf of bread, a magazine, a can of fizzy drink, a cinema ticket and so on.

So why all the fuss with petrol?

Why do we as consumers, who consistently fail to put ourselves in a competitive position by buying bigger cars with bigger engines, ignoring public transport or even just using our own two feet, then complain when the petrol companies take advantage of our own stupidity?

Petrol is a commodity. If you want to pay less for it, use less of it.

I must have upset someone....

Saturday 16th Feb, 10.39pm...MD Webhosting has crashed again. My email and sites are down and the whole MD site has gone...cannot even connect to their front page.

Something must be up with my karma...I spent the afternoon trying to install WoW only for it to keep failing on the 4th CD. So everything I had to install up to the 4th before I'd find out it wasn't working...can you imagine how frustrating that is?

But serious MDWebhosting...I might even start a Facebook group for these guys...

Peru Riot Police go Robocop

These new uniforms by Peru’s anti riot police are truly awesome - they were seen parading yesterday for the first time and have been described as Judge Dread meets Batman.

read more | digg story

The webhosting dramas continue...

So very briefly the service resumed yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours, and then fell over again early last night about 8pm and hasn't been seen since. The phone line is permanently engaged and emails to the centre get a standard response. Even when you try to go into live chat you get this:

There are currently 15 chat request(s) before you in chat queue.
Please wait, an operator will be with you shortly.

Total and absolute shambles. NEVER EVER host with MD.

MD Webhosting: Failed AGAIN

And to make matters worse this time, the failure is obviously SO catastrophic, they've removed the 'help & support' and 'server status' pages are being hit with so much traffic, that they're failing too...

Anyway, here's the message from them:

Australian Servers: Current Downtime and Restoration of Client accounts
Posted By: Mark Galea On: 09 Feb 2008 10:31 AM

Details: Due to a hardware failure, multiple Australian servers are inactive currently. Client sites will be restoring to normal over the next 72 hours.
If you have any further queries or if there are any issues with you site restore please contact us support@mdwebhosting.com.au

Thank you for your patience and understanding with this matter.

What I like is the deliberate ambiguity. Servers are just 'inactive'. You'll get your site back in 72 hours. I mean, it's a farce isn't it? In a service-related business like this, how do companies survive? I'm thinking of starting some sort of MD Webhosting feedback site.

Anyway, it's now 8.14am - almost 48 hours since Mark Galea posted his note...I presume I still have 24 hours to wait...

100,000 views at last...

100,000 views at last...
Originally uploaded by Carbon Images

Well, it took a while, but the account is really starting to build some momentum...and I hit 100,000 at 8.56am this morning...

Now onwards to a million!!

Five! is the magic number

Five! is the magic number
Originally uploaded by Carbon Images

Uploaded 27th Jan 2008

I was thinking of trying to pass this off as five Australian quintuplets (?) posing together in a model shoot, but the futility of that is obvious when I'm posting other pictures of Tiffany in the same set. Haha.

So how did this photo come about? Well...it just seemed a good idea at the time. We took a couple of goes at it and then compiled the picture using the background from the pose on the far right (that's our right, not hers). The other four shots were cut and pasted onto the original.

At first I tried to cut and paste as close to Tiffany as I could, but I found that didn't work and made it look very fake. So I took a rough edge around her with a bit of the background and overlaid it, and then spent some time blending the backgrounds with the original. That worked much better.

The hard parts were making sure the feet of 3 and 4 overlapped properly and didn't look false, that the shadows under the bench all merged in with each other (the sun was changing quite drastically as we moved through the shots) and that the shadows of the girl came into the picture looking natural.

All-in-all it seemed to work out quite well, and I'm pretty proud of it. I've looked through it in detail and I can't see any obvious seems, but if anyone spots on please let me know.