Simon Rumble’s blog

We've been getting quotes for heating in our house, as it's starting to get cold. Initially we thought we'd go for a flued, fan-forced gas heater in the fireplace in the lounge room. A friend has the unflued gas heater recommended by Choice and it's brilliant. Heats her whole house really well. We figured flued because then the exhaust gases go outside.

Turns out gas heaters of this calibre, flued or unflued, are around $3,000 or more plus installation. Not cheap! So we decided to have a look at ducted heating, which if it comes in at under double that, I reckon isn't a bad deal since it would heat the whole house.

Now I've found The Sun Lizard which was featured on New Inventors. It uses heat from the sun to force warm air in or out of the house, depending on the season, and stores the heat in the thermal mass of the house. Given we're in a double-brick house, we've got plenty of thermal mass.

This claims to heat by 4-6° which sounds like it'd probably be enough most of the time for us. In addition, it cools by up to 10° in summer which would be a nice bonus. At under $3,000 it sounds like a nice option, and with no ongoing costs it's quite attractive.

But I'm not sure 4-6° is quite enough, even in Sydney's mild winters. I vowed when we bought a house to never spend another winter shivering with all my clothes on and a crappy electric heater sucking down expensive juice. This is the experience of poorly insulated, unheated rental properties for about a month a year in Sydney.

I wonder if the money we were thinking of spending on ducted heating might be better spent on a unit like this and upgrading our insulation. Get the roof vacuumed and the old insulation replaced with modern, high-spec insulation. As an added benefit, it would reduce plane noise. We're also looking into double glazing, which has benefits for both thermal and acoustic insulation. Perhaps with greatly-enhanced insulation and this unit, we could get by with a crappy electric heater used for only a few days a year?

So does anyone out there have any experience with this unit?

Holly and I went to see Malcolm Middleton, formerly of Arab Strap at the Hopetoun last night. Brilliant gig! As well as the miserable Scot, the two support bands were excellent, which is refreshing as "Special Guests" are often lousy.

First up were PapavsPretty, a bunch of 17 year olds with amazing talent. Their cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart was excellent, and kids playing a Yamaha DX7 that's older than them is quite amusing.

Second was Sui Zhen, a woman with a voice somewhat like the woman from Lamb. Delicate but playful songs. Quite enjoyed it.

In between sets we got talking to a couple of Belfast lads. Metal fan Mick of the cliched name looked a lot like Hank Von Helvete from Turbonegro, though I didn't point out that they're a Norwegian gay metal band.

Finally out came the miserable Scot. Brilliant, as always. He's a genius with an acoustic guitar, and the Prozac clearly isn't working.

The photo? From the dunnies at the Hopetoun. I was amused while I took a piss, anyway.

The government of Tasmania (that'd be the Lennon government, not Gunns in case you're confused) do things differently in Tasmania. They paid for a big DC power link from the island to the mainland, which was switched on just in the nick of time as Tasmania ran out of water to run its hydro dams. Apparently the link, built to export electricity to the mainland, has flowed almost exclusively in the other direction since it was built.

Anyway, when you're running cables it's very easy to stick a few fibres in the cable run, and that's what they did. Basslink includes a fibre connection to the mainland, which would be a boon to telecommunications services in the state. Currently the only active fibre is owned by the corporate gorilla Telstra, and as monopolies tend to do, they charge like there's no tomorrow. ISP Internode, which recently stopped selling residential ADSL2+ and 8 megabit ADSL1 plans, claims Telstra charges 6 times more for the Hobart-Melbourne route than they pay to ship data between Melbourne and the US.

This would, of course, all be solved if the fibre attached to Basslink were switched on. It's been sitting there since 2003, unused. Now it emerged that the company that Tasmania contracted to operate the fibre gets paid $2 million a year regardless of whether it's operating or not. So the company would need to guarantee at least $2 million in profit a year to do better than the alternative of letting the fibre sit on the bottom of the sea, dark.

This is the thing about privatisation which always ends up burning governments. The commercial world they're trying to entice holds all the cards, and has many other investment opportunities open to them. They have expensive and clever merchant bankers and lawyers, just waiting to negotiate the vendor (the government, that is, us) up against the wall. We see it time and again when previously "commercial in confidence" contracts between the private sector and governments are leaked or opened up: governments sell the family silver, but continue to take all the risks.

When negotiating these deals, the private sector always seems to manage to put in risk-avoiding clauses that leave the public sector carrying the can if it doesn't work out. With little risk, the private sector ends up just as bloated and inefficient (often even worse) as the public sector they replaced.

So if you're looking at the private sector to be more efficient, under the types of contracts that get signed, they're not. It costs more for private companies to raise money in the bond markets, so it's more expensive. And then they need a profit margin added on top. All up meaning it costs more, while tying the hands of governments for decades to come.

If you're a Tasmanian, check out Digital Tasmania and lobby your MPs to get this sorted. It's really very simple to fix. Just turn on the fibre!

While it would be a nice euphemism, Bug Girl attempted to order pubic lice over the Internet. Unsuccessfully, I might add.

From the comments:

However heinous it is to make a living selling pubic vermin over the internet, it is somehow even more despicable to take people's money and then NOT send them pubic lice.

No, not Club Kooky but Marcus Westbury at the Logies. Hilarious description of a surreal event.

Red carpet arrival. A spotter peers in limo window to see who of any interest is in the limo. "No one!" they call back to red carpet show director crew.

I thought I'd try out Firefox 3 for a bit. Part of my job is to stay up to date with the latest and greatest, and I was hoping the much-touted memory management enhancements would be a nice plus.

So far, I'm well impressed. AJAX- and JavaScript-heavy sites are vastly faster, so for example Gmail snaps open, Google Reader zips along. The CMS I use all day every day also flies. Most importantly, they really do seem to have plugged the memory leaks. By this time of day, I'd expect Firefox to be around 200 megs, having used a few AJAX sites quite heavily. Instead, it's around 115 megs with four tabs and two CMS windows open. It also seems to go down when you close tabs and windows, which is something that didn't happen before. It also remains quite zippy.

Haven't noticed any bugs or rendering weirdness yet, which is a good sign. Only problem so far is that Firebug isn't yet available. There's a version of it for Firefox 3, but it apparently has some issues. If I decide Firefox 3 is stable enough to use all the time, I'll try out the upgraded Firebug. Life without Firebug would be a much reduced life...

There's been a bit of discussion recently about Inbox Zero, getting your email inbox empty. Well I just discovered a rather radical approach to getting there. I accidentally deleted everything in the inbox. Thought I was in another folder and deleted all.

I've got backups, so if I find there's anything vital I'll be able to recover, but for now it's strangely liberating. Will see how I go.

I've always loved Hogarth's Gin Lane and Beer Street engravings. The post-industrialized world's first moral panic was due to the flood of cheap spirits, coupled with a bored and concentrated population. "Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence" was the slogan of the gin palaces. Hogarth contrasted the debauched Gin Lane with the prosperous and healthy Beer Street, where the pawnbroker is out of business, the populace engaged in edifying pursuits. Kinda like the current vogue for talking about "binge drinking".

I've always wanted to buy some prints of these classic campaigning engravings. Periodically I look online and I invariably find "Gin Lane" but rarely "Beer Street" in the same format from the same vendor. Anyone got any suggestions to get this?

Alternative would be to print these public domain versions taken from Wikimedia Commons. Not sure the resolution is good enough though. I used to live around the corner from Hogarth's House and never made it there. I bet they would sell prints!

We spent the weekend staying with Scott and Katie down in Hobart. Had a really fantastic time hanging out with them, seeing the sights, drinking, eating, meeting some of their friends and catching up with our other mates who've moved down there, Martin and Jo.

Thursday night we were collected from the airport and taken back to their pad to be fed delicious mussels, rice paper rolls and pickled squid. Yummy! The seafood down there is spectacularly good and bloody cheap.

Friday we drove down to Cockle Creek on Recherche Bay, a gorgeous spot right down in the South-East of the state. The only sad part was seeing the moonscape left by clear-felling of trees by the rapacious logging company that owns Tasmania.

Friday night we hooked up with some of Scott and Katie's for a few drinks, then ate a fantastic meal down on the docks with Martin and Jo. More brilliant seafood (I had the ocean trout with sumac) and some good Tasmanian wine. The beers at the place were the fantastic (but overpriced on the mainland) Moo Brew, especially the really rich dark brew.

On Saturday we went to the amazing Salamanca Markets, which are a long strip of stalls selling great local food, tourist nick nacks and the like. I picked up an luscious blackberry jam and a small block of the most amazing, richly-flavoured percorino that had been aged two years. Lots of fun and the bratwurst made a good breakfast. Scott and I dropped into Parliament House for a tour of this big old building. Nice to see where all the dodgy decisions get made.

Saturday afternoon we drove around town a bit, and up Mount Wellington where the initial view was obscured by clouds, but just as we were leaving the clouds cleared and I got some good photos. We had a look at the outside of the Cascade Brewery, though the tours were all booked out so we missed out this time.

Today was another great day. We dropped in to see Martin and Jo's house, which is really incredible. They've been very fortunate to find such a lovely house, all ready to go. Next we all drove into town for a quick late seafood lunch on the docks again before we had to head to the airport.

Loads of fun and Hobart seems a beautiful town. Scott and Katie would love us to move down there, but I'm not sure I could cope with the cold so well. I'd miss the long, languid summers and the afternoons spent outside. I'm sure you get some of that down there, but not as much as in Sydney! On the plus side, it'd be the perfect place to grow all the fruit trees I want.

I took a bunch of photos as did Scott.

Australia has a long history of propping up the economies of the remote regions. You get tax breaks for living in remote areas, telecommunications providers are forced to provide phone services and we subsidise connecting them to the Internet. Australians have an emotional connection to the bush, despite the fact that most of us don't live there and a large proportion have never even been anywhere particularly remote.

I've been thinking about this recently after the new government's tender for a Fibre To The Node network stipulates that 98 percent of the population should have 12 megabit broadband. 12 megs is a pretty fat pipe, and you've got to wonder why they set the bar there -- was it based on any cost/benefit analysis or did they just pluck a number from the air? And where does 98% come from? What kind of density are those last few percent spread over?

What I've been considering is how much it makes economic sense to prop up all these places, and does it distort rational market incentives? For example, Australia has enormous farms in quite marginal land. Perhaps the best outcome would be to not farm these areas, given their fragility and the marginality of the business?

As another example, I once visited a family friend's enormous farm in South-West Queensland. Very dry, dusty land with a couple of sheep per square kilometre. The farmer had a main house on one side of the property and another small house on the other side of the property that was used only a couple of weeks a year. At the time, Telecom was forced to supply phone service to these remote areas at a maximum cost of $5,000 for installation. The microwave links to provision these services would have cost quite a few orders of magnitude more to supply. Because of this perverse incentive, the farmer had a phone installed at the little-used house, where previously they'd kept in contact with the main house via HF radio. So the taxpayer bore the cost of installing all this, when in reality it wasn't particularly needed.

The same idea comes in with this broadband subsidy. Now I'm sure every farmer out there would love to have metro-equivalent broadband, the ability to watch YouTube and the like. But do they really need it? I'm struggling to think of any business-essential application that would require the bandwidth and low-latency of broadband.

Telemetry from sensors would use very minimal bandwidth, and isn't all that latency-prone, so would be much more cost-effectively carried by other means. Access to weather reports and commodity prices isn't exactly high-bandwidth stuff: a 56k modem would do fine. Even having webcams strewn around a property so the farmer can keep an eye on things when away isn't going to use enormous bandwidth.

So what pressing issue requires a subsidy for this? It seems rather extravagent. The political sums don't add up either. These regions are almost all National voters, and would never elect Labor (despite the agrarian socialist Nats having more in common with the ALP than the reactionary, conservative Libs).

I've long argued that we should stop subsidising farming anything like as lavishly as we do. Farmers are business people like all others, so why do they qualify for such extravagent treatment, apart from some weird sentimentality?