Key signing in Sydney on 12th September, 2008

Geo: -33.85967,151.207025

Udo van den Heuvel is visiting and would like to do a key signing to improve the web of trust. I've suggested The Australian in The Rocks where I tend to take overseas tourists because they have good beer and pizzas topped with both our two national animals, in a good central location.

If you're coming, please bring identification that matches your key and a bunch of little slips of paper with your key details and fingerprint on it, to enable people to verify your identity and key. I'll be following the "informal" method.

Friday 12th September
18:00 for 18:30
key signing, then beer and pizza.
The Australian, 100 Cumberland Street, The Rocks
Probably the back room "ladies" bar. I look roughly like this.

The Obama Blend

I just bought some coffee beans at the phenomenally-busy Campos Coffee on Missenden Road. I had to write down the description to share with you.

The Obama Blend

Great deptch of character, strong and eloquent. This very appealing blend unites coffees from Africa and the Americas to produce a cup which has gotten us excited. Formidable middle palate flavours, syrupy with an uplifting finish. Excellent choice for going forward and ideal for those interested in change.

I didn't try the McCain blend. Don't think I'd like the thin, weak, old-fashioned bitter flavour.

Testing my geo mobblog

Geo: -33.902166,151.163230 Testing my geo mobblog Before our big trip around Europe I set up this system to blog with added geographic tagging. Turned out that on the road I couldn't use gprs so it never happened. I'm off skiing next week so I want to see if it all still works.

Fruit trees are in

Apples and passionfruitPlums

I planted out all the fruit trees and vines today. There's two types of apple, Dwarf Dorsett Golden and Dwarf Tropical Sweet, two types of plum, Maiposa and Narabeen, and two types of passionfruit, the familiar Black and one called Sunshine Special. They all came from Daleys Fruit Tree Nursery up in Kyogle.

You may be concerned that I've put them so close together. This is intentional, as I'm following the Backyard Orchard Culture idea, where you grow fruit trees much closer together than normal, and the trees compete with each other. This, and aggressive pruning, keeps the tree sizes manageable. In a small inner city backyard, this is the only way to go really. It also means I get some cross pollination and more varities. We'll see how it goes.

Also in amongst the apple trees and passionfruit is a Comfrey Bocking 14 from Digger's Club. This plant apparently digs deep and pulls up trace minerals from the sub-surface, making it a valuable compost and mulch crop.

One side of the gardenThe
other side of the garden

The garden is really starting to take shape. Two nice garden beds, the fruit is in. I get the feeling we're nearing the end of Winter and in the next few weeks, the weather will really turn. Then this garden is going to go nuts! I can't wait to get the Spring plantings in, though we're still waiting to harvest broad beans, brocolli, silverbeet, kale, parsnips and brussels.

Channel 7 misses the digital point

Channel 7 holds the rights to broadcast the Olympics, but clearly doesn't get the possibilities that digital television brings.

Last night was the first football match, with Australia's mens team playing Serbia. The game started at 19:00 Sydney time, but Seven delayed coverage until 21:00. What's more, they interrupted coverage to cut to the announcement of the flag carrier for the opening ceremony. Then they broke for an ad at the forty minute mark, in other words with only about five minutes to half time.

This kind of thing is completely avoidable with digital television. They could have very easily used spare bandwidth on their transmitter to show the football match live, while keeping their main-channel programming.

The DVB standard, used for digital terrestrial television in Australia and most of the world outside North America, allows for all kinds of dynamic reconfiguration of channels and bandwidth. In Australia the mandate for high definition television reduces the available bandwidth, there are alternatives.

For example, the bandwidth on the high def channel could be reduced during the Olympics. Or Channel 7 could lease spare bandwidth from some of the other broadcasters, perhaps with some revenue sharing -- DVB receivers are very flexible with where the programming comes from.

This kind of setup would be useful throughout the Olympics. There's loads of concurrent stuff going on, so why not show more of it? If the broadcasters want to push the digital switchover, using the technology to its full capacity during such a high-profile event would surely help.

Another alternative would have been to allow SBS, the "complementary" broadcaster for the Olympics, to carry all the football. SBS are the acknowledged home of football in Australia, and we would have ended up with good live coverage and knowledgable presenters. I'm not the only one to suggest this, of course.

As an aside, aren't the Chinese spectators subdued? I've seen more lively funerals than last night's football match!

GroceryWatch

So the ACCC has launched the new "GroceryWatch" site, GroceryChoice, which gives comparisons of a basket of goods between supermarkets. I wonder how hard it would be to game this system, if you could work out what was in each basket? Dropping the price of a single item could have a big impact.

UK retailers do this with what they call "known value items", such as milk, bread, eggs and bananas. Customers know how much these normally cost, so by dropping the prices on just those items, customers get the illusion of cheap prices and get stung on the prices of goods they can't so easily compare.

The best news from the supermarket inquiry is that the government will bring in mandatory unit pricing reporting. I wrote to the NSW fair trading minister about this a few years ago, with the response that there wasn't demand or need. Unit pricing means the supermarket shelves will tell you the price per standard unit, for example price per 100ml or 100g. Next time you're in a supermarket, compare the prices of 400g and 800g cans of tomatoes. The 800g cans cost more than double the price of a 400g can.

The site itself seems fairly well designed, though the colour scheme isn't ideal. Yellow-on-green isn't really ideal. There's a "latest news" and "subscribe" option but no RSS feeds?

The papers managed to find someone prepared to moan about the site, because he has vision and mobility problems. Sorry Mr Kerr, it's not the web designer's job to show you how to turn on the disability options of your software. They've done everything that they should (though the colour choice isn't helpful) to make it easy for you. Learn where the options for a user-defined stylesheet and minimum font-size are, and use them. Better yet, I bet you're using Internet Exploder. Try Firefox and see the zoom option -- it rocks! (Ctrl + and Ctrl - or Ctrl and the mouse wheel). If you still need more help, there are other tools that will help.

Fastway do it again!

Fastway courier forges delivery signature again

Yet again, Fastway couriers fraudulently forge a signature to "prove" delivery. At least this time they didn't forge my own name. In this case, the courier didn't bother to knock. We were in bed at the time and heard the delivery.

If you run a business selling things by mail order, do not use Fastway couriers. There's a reason they're the cheapest! You pay less and gain extra disgruntled customers.

In other news, my fruit trees have arrived! Can't wait to plant them out.

Weekend of garden bed making

Earlier in the week I thought I'd missed fruit trees, but suddenly one of the suppliers has got some more stock. So I've quickly ordered some trees today. I'm changing tack slightly, as according to Backyard Orchard Culture you can grow multiple trees very close together. The advantages of this are that you get more variety, cross-pollination and the trees compete with each other, resulting in smaller and more manageable trees.

So on this note I've ordered two apples and two plums. I'll grow them very close together near our fences. That should mean a decent bounty of fruit. Also ordered two passionfruit vines, to run up the fence. Next Winter I might look at ripping out the ornamentals (weeds, I say!) in the front garden and replacing them with something more productive, like lemons and limes.

This weekend I'll have to make up the rest of the garden beds. It's gonna be a pretty big job as I have to mix five bags of sheep shit amongst the beds, but that should give the soil some good structure. At the moment it's pretty sandy on top, and a bit clay further down.