Ru Jih ate it anyway (or so I’m told)

A while back, CityRail started having these Empty Trains. I can’t for the life of me work out why anyone would choose such a stupid name. Does it mean that there’s no one inside? Does it mean it doesn’t go anywhere afterwards, as in, it’s terminating? (If so, what’s wrong with the word terminating?) I suppose it’s better than a (null) train.

The real WTF in the picture, though, is how a platform 23 service ended up on the Illawarra Line screen.

If the question is about the Sydney Law Revue 2008, the answer is no. (The quote is from the “Holding out for a US Hero” skit, the closing skit.)

Last year, I wrote about the half-executed jokes that had the potential to be so much funnier. I wish I could make a similar comment this year. This time round, the directors somehow found it convenient to expend entirely with the punchlines in jokes. Instead, it was replaced with flat, meaningless drivel so that when it got to the closing, I was pretty much clapping out of politeness instead of sincere appreciation.

The occasional joke made in bad taste is to be expected in a revue; in fact, you could say it defines a revue. Normally, I’d have a good laugh at them. But given that the rest of the revue was so flat, when the (bad) jokes came around, the audience just didn’t buy them. We even had a heckler in the audience - and I pretty much agreed with everything he had to shout out. At one stage, one of the backstage members stuffed up with the mop between skits; that was almost one of the funniest moments (!).

China, with its astronomical growth and the Beijing Olympics just past, was an obvious topical subject. They didn’t fail to deliver on that count, but the jokes were so poorly delivered that they might have been mistaken for blatant racism.

To regain the confidence of its audience, the Law Revue in future years needs to create a coherent presentation that carries some kind of energy throughout the performance. A little bit of introspection might help; I’m sure if the directors actually sat down and listened to some of their own jokes, they might agree that they weren’t quite so funny after all. There was no doubt some great talent on stage; whether this talent was used most effectively is another question.

Dead iPod Touch

Another day, another iPod Touch calamity. While updating one of the installed applications, gremlins attacked and icons no longer appear on my home screen.

I’m not an Apple fan-boy, I have never been, and I am unlikely to convert because my first foray into the world of Apple products has been a largely unhappy journey. iTunes, at least on Windows, is slow and often unresponsive. Backing up my iPod Touch literally takes several hours, and the version 2.0.1 update took four attempts. The music interface, while great for the Latin-alphabet world, is a pain to navigate with Chinese songs and artists. Installing and upgrading applications via the iPod Touch interface is a slow and arduous affair. While there have been some outstanding applications, the majority are uninspired and useless. You also often find two or more applications that do very similar things, but each lacking in various regards, which means you end up keeping all of these applications; the closed model of the iTunes Store discourages, and in fact prevents, modifications and extensions a la open source software.

I could keep going on for quite some time, but I’m sure others have documented the failings of the iPod Touch and the iPhone in more detail. I can overlook some bugs, but wholesale destruction of my data is unforgivable.

Somehow this failed to work in Opera Mini on my mobile…

ok will blog about hong kong now…

i don’t know whether to blame Opera or WordPress - because it used to work!

In news that shouldn’t surprise anyone, trains on the East Hills line (the bane of my existence) and the Bankstown line were stalled for an ungodly thirty minutes around the City Circle because there was this lunatic running around on the tracks in the tunnel near St James. Did I hear someone mutter the word “fragile”?

What made it worse was how the station staff responded: almost like chooks with half their heads cut off, they had no idea what to do. It was mildly amusing when this train pulled up (from the opposite direction), and after a few minutes, the station staff asked the guard if he was leaving yet, but he threw his hands up in the air and told them he didn’t know where his driver went… he somehow just disappeared.

This is one of the styles in Vista’s built-in clock sidebar gadget. It just begs the question… why?

Speaking of the sidebar, I’ve tried installing some custom gadgets (some are pretty useful) but a number of them just fail to install (and I’m browsing the gadget site using IE not Firefox). You click on the install button and it downloads, but nothing happens. If it’s because those ones are designed for the beta versions of Vista and it’s failing to install to protect my computer, then that’s fine - but an error message would be nice.