commuting to uni

I planned for the worst-case but the journey was pretty much spot-on prediction. That put me on campus 25 minutes before class started. Breakfast was something to mull about. Originally I thought that the Subway $2 deal would be something good to take advantage of. However my optimised route bypasses any reasonable store with annoying efficiency.
Today I found traffic lights annoying. I think my previous journeys on foot and two wheels have had too-optimised paths and I'm not used to waiting for light changes. On the other hand, I think I'm becoming more confident with lane changing... funnily enough from being on a bike rather than in a car.
Two layers of clothing is more than enough and I found myself short on luggage stowage once the jacket came off. Riding with a tshirt with vest was quite a good compromise.
Hills remained annoyingly slow, with a instantaneous speed of around 10km/h. On flats I managed 35km/h. Downhill, but not today, I've managed 45km/h before my eyes water so much that I can't read the display.
Classmates enjoyed seeing the helmet-mounted mirror and remarked on the rear-weighting and the thinner tyres.
I'm not all that pleased about my front derailleur. It seems to fail in changing a fair bit. Cornering was a challenge with the full load.
All up it was quite a good first run. 48 minutes for a 11.5km run with full-load. That's pretty much the same as the bus ride with walking to the bus stop.

polling assistant-ing

Last weekend I had the pleasure of working at a polling place for the federal election. It was not without issues in gaining employment in the first place. The AEC seem to ignore their web applications. It was only after some eavesdropping, round-about thinking aloud from co-workers and other weird human interaction that I was verbally prodded into following up my application by telephone. To my delight the AEC was both eager and desperate sounding on the phone and promised me a call back later that evening. This was on a Thursday.
On Friday I received an email telling me to do the online course. It goes through all you need to know but won't remember. There's a 1% pass rate required on the quizzes.
Saturday was when it all happened. The officer in charge, OIC, gave me the role of ballot box guard. It sounds quite alright but in reality it's not that interesting. It mainly involved making suggestions to people about which box to put their ballot papers in. One fellow didn't take kindly to my suggested, retorting that he'd been doing it for 70 years already. It was reasonably straightforward except that some people decided to fold the House of Representatives paper into the Senate paper.
It took until around 1PM for the queues to die out. After lunch I had a stint as ordinary issuing officer - just the regular name marker person. It does require marginally more knowledge and more brain-sapping interaction. Although it was quiet when I got into it and so I went to sharpen some pencils and clean out the booths. I really wouldn't mind the job of 2IC - it seems like a position where you can jump in to relieve people while holding experience and knowledge but not so much that you're flooded with paperwork like the OIC.

Days like this also provide an opportunity to see the whole spectrum of the community. But firstly, I did happen to make myself known to my granduncle and his mob. The generation+1 members didn’t recognise me at first but ran back in five minutes after putting in their ballot papers to confirm my identity. This is one of those days where people who ordinarily wouldn’t be seen in public with their parents are caught doing exactly that. It was notable that white male Asian female couples tended to be older and not always arriving together and almost certainly without the children being present. Asian male white female couples tended to be younger and with kids in tow, or rather man happily pushing stroller. The kids from a darker man with curly hair (possibly West Indies) and Asian female were absolutely adorable. “I voted” stickers turned out to be an absolute winner with the kids, but not so much with the adults. That is, except for a group of mid-twenties dark-dressing group of four (Goth or something?) who were thrilled to be offered a whole roll of stickers.

By the close of polling I had managed to stuff down two meals in a space of four hours. A class of 2006 MHS dude joined the crew and we developed an effective way of sorting Senate papers. Well, at least much more effective than the others. I think the 2IC was impressed, especially with the gravity-assisted compact temporary storage. There’s still a place for time and management studies and it would be rather cool to implement it in the next election.

Party-appointed scruntineers turned out to be much more well-mannered than the OIC and my work manager made them out to be. In fact, everyone was really nice! An old lady said that to me in the morning after I bode her a good day as she walked past the ballot box. I thought the OIC didn’t have to be that nice – there were plenty of things that would have ticked me off. Mainly ignorant questions.

All up it was quite a worthwhile experience. Recommended. 10/10

Transport Rant

Real Metcard compensation


Get train compensation and cash it out. This part assumes that you've all been diligent in claiming compensation from Connex and later Metro, travel through both zones one and two and works best if you're on concession. 

1. Claim your compensation for those months where train performance was low enough to allow for it. You will have been using a zone 1+2 monthly of either of the fares.
2. Claim your compensation for one-off incidents such as the July 27th incident.
3. Gather up your full-fare zone 1+2 daily Metcards. Not used ordinarily due to poorer value in that you'd rather reinvest that face value into a monthly and/or use a concession fare instead.
4. Glance at the tram zone boundary changes. http://www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au/news/news-promotions/tram-fares-simpler-with-zone-changes
5. Fill out this form and send it in by September 30 to get cash back on all of those sub-optimal tickets: http://www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au/assets/PDFs/Application-forms/MetcardRefundApplicationForm.pdf

Myki 
Am I better off?
Due to the discrepancies/averaging in calculating Myki pass daily rates, it may work out to be more than the equivalent Metcard in certain months. But I'm thinking about the actions involved. Metcard requires the wallet to be opened once for a journey. Myki requires the wallet to be presented twice but not opened. A bit of a trade-off. I'm leaning towards Myki for this having enjoyed Octopus in Hong Kong.

Figure 1: Myki miscalculation


The above image shows Myki miscalculating the best fare. A reasonable person would use their 10x2 hour zone 2 ticket for the bus and then a 10x2 hour zone 1+2 ticket for the rest of the evening after 6PM. That would involve $1.01 plus $2.48 giving $3.49 rather than the $3.95 here. Myki staff were prompt in replying but they refunded me $1.47 instead of changing it to a zone 1+2. I was under the impression one was not permitted to extend a non-periodical ticket into another zone. Ah well.


As an aside, the almost Asian-looking Myki-mate is a champ... working at Monash on those miserable (and rainy) days and nights at the exposed bus loop. 

Figure 2: Myki gg


Myki was a bit slow in loading on my pass. It had used my Myki money in the morning. I thought that it would be unreasonable for a pass to become active in the middle of the day after my Myki money had been used, meaning I only get half a day's utility from that first day of the pass. I'm optimistic that the system is robust enough to work that out and refund me. Hopefully that message means it's considering the matter rather deeply. I did buy a thirty-two day pass but I'm almost regretting it because I could cycle on that last day before the MSB.


Bicycle

Figure 3: Bicycle port-side

Figure 4: Bicycle stern


Yeah, now I can carry lots of 'stuff' while on the bike and maybe even try to beat the bus to uni on some days.


Long bus

Figure 5: Big bus

Figure 6: Something cool


Yeah, I thought it was cool.

Subway vouchers at Box Hill

After having the delightful experience in the late afternoon of being in a stationary bus during which a car collided into it, I found that I was going to be late to an event that evening.
It was an opportunity for me to kill the time to the next train by using my Subway vouchers. I had a few, but the one i decided to use was the buy one six-inch get one free as long as you purchase a regular drink. It was all going rather smoothly until the Chinese guy took my voucher. At first he was confused by the lack of a price on the voucher. He was then berated by his boss in Mandarin for not understanding English. Funny guy.
It was a pizza sub. The whole deal ended up being $6.45 and the boss said the other voucher works out to be the same (I threw it in just to confuse the first guy). Ordinarily the foot-long sub would be $7 without a drink.
Win.

sleepy

I nodded off in a 9AM lecture and 11AM tutorial. Ahh good days. Neck is sore from sleeping in the bus.

I ended up next to a smoker for a random activity... geez that smells awful.

Thanks for the comment spoon/hamburgular.