While shopping in Balmain Woolworths on Monday I found that pieces of bright orange cake were getting pushed in the direction of customers. Initially I thought that would be a fruit cake, but it turned out to be a sponge chocolate cake.
So, why the cake?
What are they celebrating?
Apparently a new addition to their Everyday Rewards point cards. A deal with Qantas that you can get frequent flyer points by spending money at Woolworths.
So now you get Qantas points and fuel points in the same transaction.
Although, it should be noted that you only get points when you spend more than $30.
So, is really worth the effort of getting a point card if you are just going to make small purchases? And do you really want to make it easier for Woolworths to collect data about your shopping habbits?
Once News Plus, now minus news. It seems the news agent in the food court under Myer in the Sydney CDB has gone. Replaced by a Angus & Robertson book sale.
As an interesting aside, the food court is covered in advertising for the Dymocks store in George St.
Competing factions chains I suppose.
How young is too young for girls to use deodorant?
In a supermarket the other day I noticed these ‘perfumed body spray’s, right next adult deodorant. Obviously they are aimed at young girls via the Bratz brand.
Do young girls really need to be pushed into the word of makeup and perfume?
On the corner of George and Liverpool streets this afternoon I noticed this altercation between a tour bus and a car. The bus driver was trying to get the car to reverse away.
Looks like the bus tried to turn into Liverpool St from the centre lane, and the car tried to undertake it.
Of course, all this is just the opinion of a untrained casual observer.
It did block traffic down one side of George street for a while.
Can’t seem to find any mention of the incident on the RTA Sydney traffic reports. Which, I find, have been usefuly turned into twitter feeds:
sydneytraffic
sydtraffic_city
sydtraffic_nth
sydneytraffic_nw
sydneytraffic_sw
In the chocolate aisle at Coles the other day I noticed a paradox in pricing. The 100g blocks of Cadbury chocolate are $2.99. And the 200g blocks are on special at 2 for $6.
So would you rather spend $3 and get 100g, or $6 and get 400g? Very much a economics of scale I suppose. 
Inspired by the recent Sydney meme, here is today’s cartoon.
SBS reports that Melbourne has been declared ‘swine flu capital of the world‘. With 874 reported cases of H1N1, Melbourne has twice the prevelance of Mexico.
That is a swine flue cases at 1 to 9,139 in Victoria, and at 1 to 21,860 in Mexico.
Of course, there are 109,955,400 people in Mexico and only 5,205,200 people in Victoria. And Australia only has 4.5% of the cases in the world.
Do you catch the train at peek hour in Sydney and feel a little squashed? An article in the SMH on Monday stated that 73.6 percent of trains were overloaded, some with up to 145% capacity usage!
Of course 100% capacity only means that everyone gets a seat. So the extra 45% are left standing.
Now, if you’ve ever been to Tokyo train station at peak hour you will know that they must measure capacity reached when you can’t squash any more people on to the train.
All the Tokyo trains have seats along the walls, not in rows like Sydney. So there is much more standing room. Allowing people to be packed in more densly.
And while the morning peak hour is quite crowded, at night between 11pm and 12am is much worse. As trains stop running shortly after 12am, everyone makes a mad dash to get home, and the people are often squashed into trains like sardines.
And is not just trains that are packed. The station platforms are wall to wall people too.
Though all the people are quite orderly about it all, lining up in nice queues to get on the train. Of course, there are 4 (or 6) sets of doors on each side of the carraige. And the trains actually stop so doors line up to where they are marked on the platform.
1001
The flickr upload software for MacOS X, 1001, has been updated to version 1.0.17.
This release seems to fix the problems that I recently started to experience with 1.0.15:
- No sets were being listed, and
- Photos were not being added to groups.
Nice to see that the software is still being maintained.
The light rail outside Market City, the Paddy’s market building, in Chinatown Sydney.
