TRS Madness

Departing Australia was a bit more chaotic than usual. We had to turn back as mum forgot her address book. This lost us a bit of time. However, the most annoying part was the queue for the Tourist Refund Scheme. It clearly hasn't kept pace with its success. There were many disappointed and angry travellers, mainly Chinese and on our flight, who were told to board as the departure time was nearing and the claims wouldn't be processed in time. The queue was in excess of thirty minutes and there were only three staff processing claims. Perhaps a lack of communications caused the excessive delay [a la "not food; sweets" lady on Border Security].
Anyway, I don't think the scheme is a good use of resources. $300 is probably a bit low, compared to the postal declaration limit of $1000. There must be a better way to encourage spending locally while avoiding such excessive processing. It's a bit like Woolworths Dickson though. There's no incentive to add staff at Dickson since there's no real alternatives to the queues there for inner Canberra. In the same light, you must queue for TRS as it's the only way to get your money back.
Oh, I also managed to lose my phone's battery cover with integrated antenna. Lameness.
Awaiting Sam's comments...

Bike light phase 1

Finding the right combination of price, brightness and battery configuration can be difficult for a bicycle light. I started off with one from here:
http://www.buyincoins.com/details/white-led-head-bike-bicycle-light-flashlight-w-mounting-access-02-product-379.html

It came with a pretty useless reflector and LED.
My next step was to replace the LED with a Cree XM-L. It's a bit excessive but oh well.

I had read about the epoxy layer being too thick on the board so I followed some steps to make the thermal interface more direct. My tubes of Arctic Silver thermal epoxy had gummed up so it was a bit of trouble gluing it down!

Running off three rechargeable AAA cells directly, the LED draws around 350mA. I'd say this is about the minimum I'd go with for now, with about 1W output. I'll take the XM-L module to phase two and swap in an older module for this torch... I think I still have an XR-C somewhere that I haven't blown up yet.

signs of an affluent city

One time, while walking with friend to his car after dinner I was greeted by the nice sight of free money. There were shopping trolleys abandoned on ANU grounds. All I had to do was push the trolley to the other side of the road, to the other cluster of trolleys, and I'd get a dollar out of it. However, I was greeted by the sight of a two-dollar coin in another trolley. The trolley cluster was otherwise pretty messy with trolleys facing opposite directions and chained together. After reversing the order, I managed to get two-dollars out of the endeavour.

Later on there was a dollar in a trolley on Northbourne but no other trolleys nearby. Obviously there's too much money in that city for people to bother - even for students.

follow up image to quality of sleep

Quite a lot of metal peeled back here. Fun times.

quality of sleep

Hmm
Can't sleep. There's a truck outside my house being repaired after taking out most of its load section with the help of a tree. All of the noises, hammering, metal sheets flapping about etc are quite annoying. I will have to try get some photos in the morning and see if I can find somewhere more peaceful in the meantime.
Damn, I had good sleep in Canberra.

newspaper articles

 

Surely if proceedings had progressed that far, it's not merely attempted rape... unless he was waving his appendages around beforehand.

BOT

Just in case anybody has been wondering, I've been thinking, allowing those thoughts to mature through its gestation period and finally manifest into some fanciful electromechanical action that might be considered a robot (barely).



Week 11 end from Jason Phong on Vimeo.

After setting the scene with the black box obstacles, things happen at 2:45 and 5:00.