Ok Hugh & Eddie, it's time for you to take it away again: One Day More!
I'm mentally calculating the "Hours left" for 2024 and the "Hours of work" to do in my head. I'm not going to get it all done. I'm left trying to decide who I have to let down.
For all the stupid technology added to cars over the past 20 years, it's easy to forget that there has been some awesome tech added as well.
Failing that you could script it to buy the gift card at the time you want, maybe even sell that as a service to other users?
Alas, the promotion I was making use of ends on Dec 20. So that method won't work. It's a good idea, though.
Not sure how such a site would handle payments for the gift cards, though? I sure wouldn't want to be collecting credit card details and passing them through to Woolies via some API. Any API they have (if they have one) is unlikely to accept payments. It sounds like it'd be less work to make a competing egift card site.
Buying an eGift Card for Christmas:
Nath: 'Hey Woolies, I wish to purchase a gift card on your site, but want to delay the gift until Christmas morning. Can this be done?'
Woolies: 'Of course not. If you buy a gift card at 2am, we send a text message to your recipient at 2am. They clearly want this gift right now!'
I'm not going crazy, right? It's a super obvious thing when buying a gift card that the person buying the gift would want to specify a delivery date/time as well as a recipient yeah? I told my work colleague and he reckons I'm an edge case. Most customers would want the gift sent immediately. Even if I wanted it same-day, I'd want the option to send it during waking hours.
Huh. And here's me grumbling the last time the kids and I got our hair cut and it came out to $80 for the three of us.
I rather like this presentation style, personally. If you want so skip it and the background stuff it covers though, you can just search the page for "We asked a panel" and it'll go straight to the part where they give grades for what the government has done with their term.
Could also go Not Betoota fairly easily.
Not the Chaser? 😃
Our story is the same as most people: We can afford to rent; but we can't afford to buy.
We aren't in danger of being put on the streets, but we are under a different sort of crisis where a combined household income of over $200k is somehow not enough to buy a house these days.
Not that long ago, you could buy a 4-bedroom house for $200k. House prices have gone stupid.
Ooh - I have first-hand experience with this! I had green, but needed to stop because a pedestrian was crossing the intersection illegally somewhere in Hawthorn. I was over the line, but not 100% over the line. When the pedestrian cleared the way, I continued and the camera went off. Your whole car needs to be over the line when the light turns red. The flash goes off the same millisecond, there is zero grace on that.
I challenged, and had to go to court. Explained what happened and the magistrate and he agreed that I was not breaking the law. I can't find the outcome term online now - I'm at work and don't have time to research it. I can explain what happened in layman's terms though:
When you challenge the offense, you are saying the police made a mistake. That you shouldn't have been issued an infringement. The police will fight you in court over that.
In my case, I was given a verdict that basically meant "person is guilty but there are extenuating circumstances", and I didn't need to pay the fine etc. It did cost me a day off work, though
If you are saying your front tyres were over the line, so you're not guilty, I don't think that'll fly. Your whole car has to be over the line when it turns red. In my case, they could see I was doing like 5-10km/h when the light turned red, I obviously wasn't zooming through. So while the photo didn't show the pedestrian, they believed me.
Not giving them an A or better on Transport is just being a jerk. Three rail line projects completed, including the Airport train line. $5 fare caps to anywhere in Perth (including the airport). Train services to hundreds of thousands of new homes. And they're not done, yet. Armadale line works are going very well, and another two lines are in the works if they get re-elected. No government in WA's history has invested so much in transport, ever. Probably no state government in Australia's history, but I'm not certain.
And that's just the rail stuff. There's also the new Tonkin Hwy project. The Reid Hwy and the Mitchell Freeway. And Wilman Wadandi Highway was just opened on the weekend. They're still going with major road projects, also. Plus, no toll roads. Any other state would introduce tolls.
That grade is just scandalous, Prof. Newman. I honestly can't see how you can stand behind that.
Never before in Australia has a state government had so much political power with so much wealth at its disposal. What does Labor have to show for its total control?
Semi freeze. Stuff that is already approved/scheduled is ok. Stuff in lower environments is ok. Nothing in UAT or Prod except emergency changes with manager approval this week.
I did have one change I was meant to implement on Friday, that now has to wait four weeks. But it is just to delete some old VMs that have been powered off for a couple of weeks. They can totally wait until 2025.
Total change freeze for three weeks starts Monday; but I have those three weeks off (so does half the office) anyway.
For whatever it's worth, I bought my iPad at David Jones 3 years ago. At the time, stock was very limited - with a 2-week wait time even at the Apple Store. But because nobody thought of David Jones as an Apple seller, they had stock. They charged the same price for Apple stuff as everyone else.
So we get far more hot days in Perth than in Melbourne. If you ever get a Perthy telling you to harden up: Melbourne's heat is worse than Perth's. Perth's weather comes from the west and every afternoon we have a sea breeze come in (Fun fact: The sea breeze used to be called the "Fremantle Docker" because it brought the ships in to dock) to take the heat away. The evenings are far nicer. In Melbourne, that heat tends to come from the north. It moves down into Melbourne and just settles over the city. You can get days where the minimum is still around 30.
Perth doesn't have that. Even on 40 degree days, our minimum temperatures tend to be in the low-20's. We can still sleep. Remind anyone from here of that sea breeze if they ever get smug about Melbourne's hot spells.
Does David Jones sell gift cards? Can you use your David Jones gift card to by a better gift card? 😆
Oi I'm not pottering anywhere, yet!
Just looking forward to the days when I can.
I join their ranks in fewer than 20 years, hopefully. I'll try to remember this when I have all that time. But I probably won't. 😆
Not now, the kids need space to run around outside and an apartment isn't going to give them that. Before I had a family, quite probably. Assuming there was good public transport (Train station?) as well. We are a one-car family, and even when I lived alone I never quite managed to live car-free. The biggest hurdle to car free life was that I couldn't carry a week's worth of groceries on the bike.
In fairness, Uber and home delivery are good options these days - those weren't a thing 15-20 years ago. It'd probably be easier to go car free these days.
At just 16, Gout Gout removes Peter Norman's national mark that had stood since 1968, producing a faster time than what Usain Bolt ran at the same age.
With a kid in Little Athletics, I've taken an interest in junior track and field this year. I've been following Gout's antics for about six months, now.
At 16 (almost 17), He just ran the fastest 200m time by an Australian sprinter, ever.
https://youtu.be/bjb4ku7GeLc
For the record, he also ran a 100m in 10.04 this year.
This is my thinly-veiled request for Christmas ideas for a bunch of people I need to buy presents for - some of whom I don't see all that often and know all that well. I thought it'd be handy to have a thread of present ideas that we can all crowd-source off each other. The best ideas are going to be neat stuff that people won't know exists and won't have already bought for themselves. I'll end up getting some people obvious stuff like alcohol and nice chocolates. Those aren't really he ideas I'm looking for.
I don't want to make rules, but I think we need a couple:
- Let's at least cap them at $50. Telling people you want a Drone, a Steam Deck or PS5 simply isn't realistic. I'm not looking for ideas in that price range (even though I'd probably love all these, myself).
- Avoid intimate stuff. I'm not talking sex toys (though avoid those too - I'm not buying my sister-in-law a dildo), but more things that are really personal like jewellery, watches and stuff that you need to know the person's tastes to get right.
The Commonwealth Bank has unveiled major changes to one of its main everyday account offerings, which will see customers charged $3 to withdraw their own money.
I hope this inspires a massive migration off CBA and a rollback of the policy. Because if it doesn't, the other banks will be sure to follow.
The Privacy Commissioner finds Bunnings Warehouse interfered with the privacy of its customers by using facial recognition without consent in 63 of its stores over a three-year period.
Apparently, Bunnings have my face on-file. I don't think I like that.
Police allege a women charged with the theft of 63,000 limited edition Bluey coins earlier this year was the getaway driver. The 27-year-old Western Sydney woman is the third person to be arrested for the theft as 40,000 of the missing coins were discovered.
I still don't think you can get any dollarbucks for yourself!
A 17-year-old girl was so severely malnourished doctors feared she was at risk of a heart attack, but her father claimed she was "the healthiest child he knew", the Perth District Court is told.
For reference, my kids both reached 30kg when they were seven!
Reece Joshua Sturgeon broke into the outback facility and remained there for two days, wearing a uniform, eating in the kitchen and telling Defence Force personnel he was on a "special mission".
Investors with 10 or more properties to their name have more debt than smaller-scale investors but use negative gearing and capital gains discounts to keep buying, tax office data shows.
And as the article says - this data is only from individual tax returns. It doesn't cover companies.
I stumbled across a sports article from a US publication and thought it interesting that it showed the USA leading the medals table.
Instead of the regular table that gives weight to Gold, silver and bronze, they just see total medals.
I sorta like it. Celebrating all medal winners equally is nice. It feels a little like fudging the numbers, though.
A Perth woman collapses in a court dock after being sentenced to nine years in prison for trying to murder her husband who had been diagnosed with dementia.
Super sad case. She tried to kill him to ease his suffering. If he'd been on the record supporting her decision, I think the sentence would have been very different. And she lost him to natural causes anyway. 😞
The gunman who shot and killed a mother and her teenage daughter in Perth's affluent western suburbs did so because he thought his ex-partner was at the property.
WA's teacher union rejects a second pay and conditions offer from the state government, stoking concerns of interruptions at schools as the union threatens to forge on with a potential strike on Tuesday next week.
Just when you thought you'd made it through the holidays. 😀
I think a half-day strike is just as bad for parents than a full one. We still need to arrange for the kids to be taken care of until 12:30. Apparently we can send them in anyway, but they won't be in class and it isn't exactly supporting the teachers to do that.
I hope there is progress in the negotiations and the strike gets called off.
The 28-minute episode doesn't disappoint with a special wedding and an answer to whether the Heelers sell up and move. But look a little closer and The Sign is full of other hidden treats too. Here's nine you might've missed. Spoilers ahead.
I just sort of assume everyone has watched the episode by now. If you haven't, I recommend doing so before you get to the end of this article.
Just 57 mega polluters are responsible for the bulk of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and most big fossil fuel players have increased, rather than decreased, their output since the Paris Agreement in 2015, a staggering new report finds.
On the one hand, it makes it really hard to stay motivated with the teeny contribution I make to reducing emissions. On the other, think of how much of a difference these 57 companies could make if they actually reached net-zero targets.
To understand why 30-somethings feel like they're struggling financially, the ABC analysed five factors — housing, healthcare, debt, tax, and income. The data reveals this generation is caught in an economic perfect storm.
I'm sure this whole article comes as a shock to nobody, but it's nice to see it recognised like this.
As Aussies head to the beaches and parklands this summer, we asked a venom expert to rank the top 10 most painful creatures they might encounter.
Facebook profited from the decline of Australia's news organisations, but enforcing the News Media Bargaining Code will make a bad situation worse without solving the problem of who will pay for the news.
Try and get past the fact that this is sort-of about Facebook. Because it's more about the demise of news than it is about Facebook, specifically.
> news organisations were never in the news business, Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at QUT, said. > > "They were in the attention-attraction business. > > "In another era, if you were an advertiser, a newspaper was a great place to be. > > "But now there are just much better places to be."
> The moment news moved online, and was "unbundled" from classifieds, sports results, movie listings, weather reports, celebrity gossip, and all the other reasons people bought newspapers or watched evening TV bulletins, the news business model was dead. > > News by itself was never profitable, Professor Bruns said. > > "Then advertising moved somewhere else. > > "This was always going to happen via Facebook or other platforms."
It's a really fascinating read. We can all agree that independent journalism is valuable in our society, but ultimately, most of us don't so much seek news out as much as we encounter news as we go about our day.
I'm sure the TL;DR bot is about to entirely miss the nuance of the article. I recommend reading the whole thing.
Tony found himself with too much time on his hands at work. What he did next challenges long-held notions of loyalty in the workplace.
I don't think this movement really got off the ground in WA, we never really had the lock-downs and remote working culture introduced through the pandemic that the Eastern states got. Still, this makes for fascinating reading.
