Fined for Not Voting

Oh dear. I've been fined $280 for not voting in a state election. Evidentally, when I moved house, and they kept mailing the wrong address with warning notices, this escalated things.

They apparently took me to court.

The first I hear about it is a letter to renew my driver's licence sent to me; which has stamped on it the words "Criminal Law Sentencing Act", and "Magistrates Court".

That's somewhat frightening.

I rather thought no one actually bothered to enforce fines like that. I'm lucky, because the wonderful person at the Magistrates Court Fines unit / call centre was quick, helpful, and ever so friendly.

Lets just see if I can't get the same response from the people who are fining me...

Boring statistics, and how I edged closer to death

I just rode about the furthest I've ever been: most of it uphill too.

Total distance came in at 45.15 km in 2:11:35; average of 20.8okm/hour, and a massive top speed of 61.6km/hour.

I climbed from a starting elevation of 127m above sea level to over 308m!

I am so totally dead.

If you are at all interested in some of the places I went, start with the Torrens River, and don't forget Linear Park. Sadly, there's not much on the Kangaroo Creek reservoir.

WorkRave: Preventing RSI

Christian suggested workrave to me, and I'm in love with it.

It hassles me to take breaks, stretch, exercise, and generally GTFO from the computer.

So if you find you need someone to tap you quietly on the shoulder and whisper take a break, then this is for you.

An Idea, Just In Time...

While Seth Godin might want a fancy rss alarm clock, I'll take a moment to go one better.

It's an alarm for your computer - not for winamp, but the actual PC.

It should be easily configurable, and it should be able to start your computer at about 8:50am - just before you begin the work day.

It should also keep an eye on the time, and politely try to shut down the computer after 6pm...

Now, how simple is that? Pretty simple. It would save power and make life so much easier for us 9-5 wage slaves...

So what's stopping this from being done?

Operator: Find people in whitepages.com.au

Here's an Operator user action to make people searchable on whitepages.com.au

You require a Surname and State/Region, and obviously, them being Australian helps.

Use cases include finding alternative (public) contact details; or confirming an address...

To install: Copy and paste this to a file, whitepages.js, use the Options menu, User Scripts, and load in whitepages.js.

var whitepages_search = {
    description: "Find on Whitepages.com.au",
    shortDescription: "Whitepages",
    icon: "http://whitepages.com.au/wp/favicon.ico",
    scope: {
        semantic: {
            "hCard" : "hCard",
        }
    },

    doAction: function(semanticObject, semanticObjectType) {
        var hcard, adr, url;
        
        if (semanticObjectType == "hCard") {
            hcard = semanticObject;
            
            if (hcard.adr) {
                adr = hcard.adr[0];
            }

            url = 'http://whitepages.com.au/wp/resSearch.do?';
            
            url += 'subscriberName=' + encodeURIComponent(hcard.n["family-name"]);
            
            url += '&givenName=' + encodeURIComponent(hcard.n['given-name'].substr(0, 1));
            
            if (adr) {
                if (adr['postal-code']) {
                    url += '&suburb=' + encodeURIComponent(adr['postal-code']);
                } elseif (adr['locality']) {
                    url += '&locality=' + encodeURIComponent(adr['locality']);
                }

                if (adr['region']) {
                    url += '&state=' + encodeURIComponent(adr['region']);
                }
            }

            url += '&textOnly=true';

            return url;

        }
    }
};

SemanticActions.add("whitepages_search", whitepages_search);