So, this is what I'm thinking…

Here’s a few more I dug up.

Typical Mandurah line patrons

People who get on and off the train at Mandurah are a strange lot. I don’t mean to imply that all people who live in Mandurah and surrounding suburbs are less intelligent than average, but if you were to go only by activity you observe at Mandurah train station then you might be forgiven for thinking that there is something in the water inhibiting cognitive abilities. For those of my non-Perth friends, I’ll give a bit of background first.

The Perth to Mandurah train line opened around Christmas 2007. It connects Perth to Mandurah, which is WAs second largest city located about 70km south of Perth. It also provides light commuter rail services to the southwest suburbs with train stops are large centres like Cockburn, Kwinana and Rockingham. It was quite a significant and costly undertaking, and almost doubled the total length of commuter rail in Perth. It takes about 55 minutes to travel the full length.

The Mandurah line has been going now for about three years, but am still not sure people down in Mandurah have the hang of it yet:

• As the train is pulling into Mandurah, there’s naturally people there waiting to get on it. During peak times, it may take 4-5 minutes until it’s ready to turn around and leave. During non-peak times they usually run every 15-20 minutes. What I don’t get is that as the train pulls into the station, people will walk or hurriedly skip along the platform beside the train to remain in proximity to some particular door, continually pressing the button in a vain attempt to open it. Often the total length walked will be longer than two carriages, each of which has two doors. Don’t these people understand that you can simply wait in one spot and let a door come to you? Sometimes I’ll be standing on the platform and one of these over enthusiastic mouth breathers will crash into me, and then look at me as if I’m something they’ve stepped in. “Dude, why are you standing there? Can’t you see I’m trying to get on the train? Let me past!”

• In the evening on the way home from work, people will get up from their seats and wait near the door a full 3km from the station (I’ve measured it on google maps). It takes another 4-5 minutes for the train to slow down and come to a stop on the platform, but there’s always a bunch of people crowded around the door waiting to get out long before the train is anywhere near the destination. Why is this? It’s not like Mandurah is a particularly busy station, and there’s usually not that many people getting off which might contribute to a bottleneck at the exit gates or in the car park exit. Also, people seem to walk along the whole train so they’re right near the very end door, as if walking through the train will save them having to walk along the platform. It doesn’t make it any quicker to get off because so many people attempting to disembark through one door causes a bottleneck.

• The exit turnstyles are another source of puzzlement for me. Like most places we’ve got gates which open and close to let one person through at a time after reading their electronic tickets. To cater for people in wheelchairs or with prams or luggage and also for travelers without electronic tickets there’s a wider exit with no gate. It does have an electronic card reader, but is also staffed by transit guards who check that people going though the exit either possess a cash ticket of correct value or swipe their electronic tickets. The strange thing is that at least two thirds of people exiting the station prefer to use this wider, non-gated exit. I can’t understand why, for two reasons. Firstly, I’ve observed that around half the people going through this exit actually possess electronic tickets. To cater for wheelchairs, the ticket reader is closer to the ground and angled in such a way that it makes it inconvenient to use if you’re able bodied. So you usually end up with a queue of people bending over to swipe their cards and then bobbing up and down to read the feedback on how much credit they have left on their cards. Meanwhile I calmly walk through the gated exit without queuing or breaking stride. Secondly, Mandurah is the last stop on a very long train ride and cash fares are almost 9 dollars. Electronic tickets give you an automatic 25% discount so I would have thought there’d be less people with cash tickets at Mandurah. It’s always the same people with cash tickets paying 1/3rd more than they should. For the stations closer to Perth, a 25% saving of a cheaper fare isn’t much at all, but the discount sure helps with a higher fare.

On the plus side, I haven’t experienced any violence on the Mandurah line like I used to on the Midland line, so there’s that.

So I like to have a little fun with my Facebook status messages. I’d rather post something entertaining than some thing mundane such as “I had eggs for breakfast”, or fishing for attention using something like “Three more days!”.

Here are some of my favourites from the last few months. Some names are blacked out to protect the innocent. Some are not, because they aren’t using their real names so they’re already anonymous.

An interesting web comic/graphic I found on the tubes. I can see that that there’s a lot of truth in this. In today’s society, we do indeed have in infinite appetite for distractions which lead us away from what is really important in our lives and I’m somewhat guilty myself. Can these distractions ruin a person? You betcha.

A few images by way of some blog.

The results are in from my Personality Disorder Test. If there’s one thing I did learn out of this, it’s that Schizoid doesn’t mean what I thought it meant.

An interesting mix of questions, and I think the results are accurate. Go on, take the test and post your results in the Comments section. You know you wanna!

Yeah, so BP has little chance of ever doing business in America again on any large scale. All the PR spin and hand wringing  in the world isn’t going to salvage anything out of the current mess so they should probably cut their losses and fire a few parting shots across the bows before burning all their bridges and pulling out for good.

BP should tell the American hypocrites to DIAF. Sure, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest man-made disasters in recent years, but America is the largest consumer of oil in the world, with an insatiable demand. And yet they’re refused to do anything about global climate change of which their use of oil is a direct result, and is an ongoing man-made disaster. To keep up with the demand, the oil companies need to drill in ever more dangerous and sensitive places. There are consequences to be addicted to cheap oil. This is one of them.

BP should’t worry about it’s image by hiring PR consultants and advertising agencies to dream up ads about making love to dolphins in rain forests. It’s not going to work. They should just hire armies of lawyers to doggedly fight every claim against them and protect their shareholders. BP can easily do business with the rest of the world.

I’ve always thought that Japan, on the whole, make the best cars. Yeah, yeah… Italian and German supercars notwithstanding, but who can afford those? My first car was a Datsun, my second a Mazda. Our current family car is a Toyota.

Since moving to our current address we’ve found the need to buy a second car, because Suzanne and the kids are simply too selfish and lazy to get out of bed before 6am and take me to the train station in the mornings.  Because I’m not in the demographic of buying European supercars I could not afford much. All I wanted was a little shitbox to get me from home the the train station in the morning and back again in the afternoon.

Coincidentally, a friend was looking to offload a car of his for cheap so I offered to buy it. It’s a Hyundai, which is a Korean make. The friend assured me it was very well looked after and maintained, and ran well. It does, and knock on wood I hope it keeps going. But there’s one little difference between our Toyota and my Hyundai which bugs me.

See, our Toyota doesn’t require you to turn the headlights off when you turn the car off. As soon as you turn the key to “off”, the headlights go out and the parking lights remain on. It’s not until you open the door that the parking lights turn off. This is pretty convenient for me because it’s just one more little thing I don’t need to remember to do. If I happen to turn the car on the next day in daylight hours and the headlights are on, no problem.

But, this behaviour gets me into trouble in my Hyundai, especially now that we’re in winter. When I leave home, it’s mostly dark. Well, dark enough that driving without headlights would be a bad idea. But when I get to the train station, it’s light enough that you can drive quite safely and legally without headlights. After I’ve parked my Hyundai and turned the key off, my instinct from years of Toyota driving leads me to grab my stuff and go, paying no attention to my headlights which are still on. I can’t tell that they’re on because the sun has already risen and I can’t see the lights reflecting off anything, and the instrumentation lights aren’t bright enough to see in daylight either. And, probably most critically, there is no friendly audible alarm found in other cars, which conveniently tells you that the boolean condition of lighted headlights and an open driver door has been met.

I’ve caught myself a couple times when I look back at my car to see that it’s parked straight, and I see an almost imperceptible red glow from the rear parking lights. D-oh! But on other occasions when I don’t second guess my parking abilities and simply lock-n-leave my car it’s not until I’m actually on the train that the doubts come: “Did I actually turn my headlights off or not?” Usually I can think back and identify that I actually did flip the switch, but one time last week I had to get Suzanne to swing by the train station car park and verify it.

So, who can I blame if I leave my lights on? Certainly not myself! But I can’t decide if I should lay blame at the feet of Toyota (and Mazda and Datsun) for making me the way I am, or blame Hyundai for not adding a feature which any other decent car manufacturer includes in any 20th century car?

Look here to see my first Australian Federal Budget. In a nutshell I have:

• set a flat tax rate of 25%, as opposed to a graduated tax rate. I could probably have raised company tax to 30% though.
• decreased welfare spending to about 2/3rds of last year
• delivered a $5B budget surplus as opposed to a $6B deficit

Would this work? Who knows. We can be glad it’s a game, and glad that I am not in charge of the Australian economy.

So, 10-Apr marks the milestone of my writing some crap every day for one month straight, just to prove to myself I could do it. Don’t be mistaken in thinking that I overestimate the value of my blogging. No sir, I know it’s crap and of little value to anyone except those who know me. Only about half of the 35 posts in 31 days are about me in particular or my family. The rest of a mix of funny pictures, products I’ve bought, lame social commentary and a history lesson. I just wanted to stick to this until I got it done, so now that I’ve got it out of my system I will probably post a bit less.