So I’m cruising up and down the Gibb River Road, which goes through the Kimberlies (and has no cell/3g coverage). Along the way on this trip I have varied between free camping in the desert, camp site or a motel/resort. Right now I am in Mornington Wilderness Camp, which is primarily a chunk of land …
Author Archives: Lance Wiggs
Let me pay my bill Telstra
Dumb: not letting me set up auto pay by credit card when I got my iPhone Moronic: being unable to pay my Telstra bill using the iPhone Archaic and lacking in security: paying using DTMF tones via mobile phone. Still – Telstra staff (handpicked?) in Perth store where I got the phone were excellent.
Top 10 things to change at eBay
I’d love to get into the numbers in the recent changes to eBay, but it is too hard on this iPhone. But regardless, here are my top 10 suggestions for change at eBay: 1: allow google checkout and integrate it. It will provide a clean payment system (unlike paypal) and will force paypal to get …
Travelling with the iphone for a week
First some rants; “nz” gets auto changed into “ms”, and the auto replacement function does not learn from its’ mistakes. Safari keeps crashing, with increasing regularity YouTube videos simply do not work anymore I can’t flip photos in wordpress Mail does not flip horizontally, making it really hard to read HTML emails that assume a …
Up the Tanami road
It’s the main drag from alice springs to the northwest, so I was expecting the Tanami Road to be pretty good. It was, but vast tracts were still unacceptabe for locals. I cruise at 100-110km, regardless of terrain. The worst roads are deep sand and sandy corrugations, and there was a bit of the first …
The Rain in Alice Springs
At just 38mm to date this year, or 10% of the annual average, Alice Springs is thirsty for more. Despite ominous clouds and local mutterings, this was it for today – a paltry few drops. Better luck tomorrow.
To Alice Springs
As mentioned I ran into tire trouble near Ayers rock- in fact 8km from the Yulara resort. The rear tire went flat, but thanks to local bus driver Tony Fox (and some patient passengers, 2 of whom I met today) the luggage was taken to the resort, and I pumped the tire up and staggered …
Drinking in outback australia
The laws about alcohol are pretty interesting in rural, or, Aboriginal, Australia. This sign is on a road into Alice Springs, and the penalties for drinking in public are displayed.. Tipping out – sure. A fine (and that’s a lot of money if you are unemployed) – well sure. But a court order to stop …
Not Ayers rock
Sure the locals stilll seem to call the big rock ‘Ayer’s rock’ rather than ‘Uluru’, but nothing excuses me mistaking this for the big rock. It was sunset as I approached the national park and it does look stunning though. The actual rock is much larger, though not as pretty, at least after sunset and …
Australia fix your roads
On the one hand it’s great for people like me that there are vast roads of days of sand and corrugations. It was tough at first but ultimately I was skimming through the sand pit that is the NT part of the great central road. Some of the road has not been graded for months, …
To Leonora and my first skimpy
From Kalgoorlie to Leonora was kangaroo country – with dead roos every 150 meters on average for much of the ride. I am not kidding. So playing safe I stopped well before dark, which is when the roos come out to play (and lose badly) ‘chicken’ with the four trailer roadtrains. Once here I dropped …
Off on the trip
Well I’m finally off on my ride around at least a bit of Australia. Pix are from Fremantle, where I got a last coffee, and the bike in Kalgoorlie, where I did manage another last decent coffee with Lacey who was sickly, so I dragged her out for food.
Borders – if it’s hard even for locals then how do you get through?
I’m a fan of open borders, and it is far too hard these days to move between countries. What’s really scary are these cases of US citizens, highlighted by a diarist in Daily Kos, who were detained by US immigration in some pretty horrible circumstances. It seems mostly to be people that are incapable of …
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TheWest’s new site – Got a Scoop?
My “personal jury” is still out on TheWest’s new website design. It’s a website aimed at big screens and broadband connections – this is a screenshot of the site above the fold on my MacBook Air. The main picture/story is huge, and rotates through four stories, the rest of the screen is dedicated to a …
Leading the design process
We are going through the Lingopal design process at the moment for various products (J2ME, Website etc.). It’s all heating up as launch approaches. This is the worst nightmare result – design by committee: (via Slashdot’s new idle.slashdot.org) Above all the video demonstrates what happens when you have lots of people inputting and yet no …
Lance Wiggs 