Melbourne Loft

Nothing but the best for my visitors!   This morning I took Scott out for a free coffee at the opening of the ANZ bank in Bourke Street Mall.   I used to bitch about my bank a lot.  But this year they have opened 2 branches in the city which stay open during the weekend.   And!!  They staff them with nice people!   I’m really amazed at how nice it has been to deal with them over the past year.   When I go in there the staff actually know what they are doing, they don’t stop serving to talk to the other staff who don’t know what to do.   This week a new 7 day a week branch opened in the mall and they were giving out free bags, coffees, balloons and Scott also found the man walking through the mall in a large foam ATM  (handy bank).
I doubt he will find anything as exciting as his trip to my bank for the rest of his stay in Melbourne.

I got an alarming email from my web host last night saying that I had almost reached my bandwith limit.   And when I checked it seems that my 4GB site has been downloaded like crazy over the past 3 days.   And only being the 9th day of the month this means the site will disappear soon unless they let me buy more bandwith.   Immediately I went and checked the stats and found that one password had used 87 gigabyte in 2 days!   I have the guy’s name, email address and home address  (it’s amazing what you can find on the internet).   Needless to say that he won’t be logging in again.   The only way this could have happened would be if he shared the password with some public group….  and they all logged in for free.  I have no idea how many different IPs used the password, I’m just glad my host warned me at the 80% bandwith level.

I won’t tell you who the guy is but I can tell you the culprit country….

So the President of the United States arrives in Sydney just an hour from now.   I don’t remember the last time that Air Force 1 came to Australia.   But I’m sure that a lot of Sydney-siders wish he wasn’t coming.   The amount of disruption his visit and the hosting of APEC is causing in the harbour city is amazing!   A giant wall built through the city to protect the visitors from protestors and the whole city closed down for a day!   That’s right…  all of Sydney has been given a holiday this Friday to avoid traffic chaos in the city as all the visitors arrive.
There is predicted violence from the protestors travelling to Sydney, so there will be thousands of police in the city as well.   It won’t be a nice place to be this weekend.  
As Air Force 1 arrives in Sydney tonite I will be waiting to see if CJ Craig follows Jed Bartlett down the steps.

Oooh…   could this be my new toy?   I was quite impressed by the latest release of IMACs and the new software.   I’m thinking that the time to change from PC to Mac could be very soon.  My company is also offering a 9% discount on Apple computers to employees…  nice!

I love Flickr.com.   This week I found this amazing photograph of the building where Loft 1 is.   Loft 1 is the apartment I bought in 2002 and when I started MelbourneLoft.com.   I miss the place a lot and someday I might love in it again.   There is a nice girl who rents it from me now.  I wish I could remember who had this on Flickr so I could credit them for the amazing photo….    a very wide angled lens obviously.

I’ve just finished watching Airport 75 courtesy of Bigpond movies  (with DVD scratches of course).   I’m now hooked on the Airport movies.   77 was pretty good…  but you must watch 75.   “The stewardess is flying the plane!”    That’s right…  after a smaller plane runs into the cockpit of Columbia 409 both the co-pilot and Erik Estrada are sucked out the hole and the pilot was glassed in the eyes….  leaving Karen Black to fly the plane!   But strangely… she decided to go back and comfort the flight crew first.    But it’s not long before Charlton Heston and his big yellow teeth arrive in a helicopter to save the day.  
Airport 75 was obviously low budget.   The painted black spot on the side of the plane wasn’t fooling anyone.   But the emotion on Heston’s face and the overacting in the back of the plane was enough to keep us all distracted.   Of course the plane was packed with Hare Krishnas, nuns, alcoholics, a stowed away dog and a little girl needing an urgent kidney transplant.   
This is a must see from the 70’s Airport series…   I read it’s the funniest of the lot too.

Does anyone know how to make screen captures from Windows Media Player or VLC player?  Snagit and Ctrl-PrintScn doesn’t seem to work.

So I picked up the new scooter from Scootacity on Elizabeth Street yesterday.   It took me forever to navigate my way around the city to end up back at my place.   The traffic was really bad.  I guess a more experienced rider would have weaved through the traffic.
And I found the most perfect secure parking station o keep it in too!   All went well riding it over the weekend.  I did accidently end up on the Eastern Freeway but quickly got off at the next exit.   And today I had a terrible experience…  as I zoomed across the intersection of Flinders and Swanston Streets my top box fell off in the middle of the road.  I hadn’t secured it correctly.   Luckily a passerby ran out in the road and grab it for me.   I’m glad it didn’t cause any accidents.   During my learning period I’m being very wary about not causing problems for other road users.   Living in the middle of the city it’s a bit hard to avoid traffic.
As I get more experience I will start to venture further out of the city.

The Bolwell VS125 came into the store on Elizabeth Street yesterday.  So I hoofed over there during lunch today to check it out.  I didn’t intend to…  but before I knew it I was hoping the skinny girl in the store would get off my bike…  and I was putting down a deposit.   This afternoon they are registering the bike and fitting a top box to the back of it.  Then I can pick it up tomorrow.   I chose the white out of the grey,black and red because it would be more visible at night…  and it looked really nice!   It’s forecast to be a beautiful sunny weekend so I intend on doing a lot of riding.
I’ll post more pics from the weekend on Sunday night.    I’m so excited!

I’ve sat through a bunch of movies from Bigpond this week.  And the best one had to be Airport 77.     I thought I had seen it before, but it must have been anotehr movie.    After all the talk lately about the fitout of the new A380 Airbus I can’t help to think the designers may have watched Airport 77 for some inspiration. The old Boeing 747  (so old that it had no door on the upper deck)  was decked out as a half precious cargo carrier, and the other half a space for a big cocktail party.    Apart from the lounges there didn’t appear to be seats for everyone…   so I don’t know what positions they all took when the thing took off.    But I do know the positions they were all in when they crashed…  standing with cocktails in one hand.
It was the seventies…   so it was okay to have a black barman and a blind man playing the piano  (and I think he regained his sight just before he died after being crushed by his piano).   The plane was magnificent !   In all it’s splendid 70’s psychadelic patterns it still looked like a swank party house as it sunk to the bottom of the ocean floor.   This movie is a keeper…   someday I want to fit out an apartment in brown shag pile carpet and psychadelic wallpaper….  and have flight attendants scampering across it as oxygen masks drop from the ceiling.

This is a bit spooky.   Last night I got onto Bigpond Movies after being sent a promo flyer about their DVD delivery service during the week.   It’s been years since I actually rented a DVD because movie rental stores just don’t exist here in the city.   Anyway, I’m on a trial of 15 free rentals.  Last night I got onto the site and picked out a bunch of movies.   And the spooky thing is that one of them was in my PO box this morning!   Did they actually rush my first delivery?   It’s really weird that it came so quickly.
So tonite is movie night in the Loft.  We’ll be watching Jonathan Caouette’s documentary about his life called “Tarnation”.