Time Out of Joint

We're surrounded by appliances that tell us the time: VCRs, stereos, ovens, clock radios, etc. Unfortunately, the times displayed often get out of touch with reality.

Power outages will leave appliances flashing 12:00 (or 0:00). And switching to/from daylight saving can be a pain twice a year. A third problem is that the timing mechanisms in the devices have varying degrees of accuracy. So from time to time you will have to go around setting the correct time on various appliances.

Battery backups help solve the power outage problem. But batteries eventually go flat and cost money to replace. And they won't help much if you want to totally power down appliances to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

After all these years, and the production of millions of appliances, you'd think manufacturers could have come up with a solution. Why haven't they taken some cues from the computer and telecommunication industries, which make use of time services and protocols (e.g. Network Time Protocol) to allow automatic time synchronisation. Appliance manufacturers could add some simple circuitry to perform a similar function over power lines. The cost of the circuitry would eventually become negligible thanks to economies of scale. In fact, manufacturers could save money by removing batteries and other parts.

Of course, this solution would require power companies to transmit a time signal over the power lines. Surely this couldn't be a huge cost? Telephone companies transmit the time and date as part of Caller ID information.

PS I don't claim to have come up with the phrase "time out of joint". Philip K. Dick used it for the title of a novel, and William Shakespeare used it in Hamlet.

Four-Wheel Drives: Car Park Nuisances

Four-Wheel Drives (4WDs) or "four by fours" (4x4s), by whatever name, are nuisances. Especially in shopping centre car parks. I'm talking about the hulking, big, "can't see through or around them" type of things.

Getting in and out of the car parks is tricky enough, with mad shoppers coming out of nowhere and darting around the place. Being parked next to a big behemoth makes it scary to reverse out of a parking space. At least with normal cars you can see through their windows to gauge any potential hazards. But with those big 4WDs, all you see is painted metal.

Sure, in the past you had to deal with the occasional van that would block your sight. Nowadays, with 4WDs apparently accounting for almost 20% of new car sales in Australia, you're more likely to get stuck next to one (or more) of these nuisances.

How about this for a solution? Quarantine all big off-road vehicles in a special parking area. Preferably far away from normal, practical cars. And since they're built for going off-road, there's no real need to clear and pave the ground to accommodate the 4WDs. In fact, leave it rough-and-ready with mounds and ditches, so their owners can at least get their cars' wheels dirty and make use of the special tyres and suspension :)

Anti-Smoking Ads and Packaging = Visual Pollution

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for programs to get smokers to kick their habit. But it's a shame that non-smokers are subjected to quite graphic anti-smoking advertisements while trying to relax in front of the TV.

If you haven't seen them, and have a morbid curiosity to view the ads, here's a link to the YouTube search results for "australian anti-smoking ads". Warning: the images of smoking-related disease are graphic.

Fortunately, a quick zap with the remote can remove the offending images.

But another form of visual pollution can be found by the side of many suburban streets: discarded cigarette packets. These not only contain written warnings such as "SMOKING CAUSES LUNG CANCER", but they also contain snaps from those disturbing TV ads. Aargh!

Perhaps we should impose a deposit scheme on cigarette packaging? It (mostly) works for soft drink bottles. The deposit should be big enough, say $1, to give smokers enough incentive to cash-in the empty packs. And if this is not enough to stop smokers from littering, then having a large enough bounty should encourage others to pick up and return the packs.

Drought-breaker

It's been a while since the last rant: 11 months in fact. Unfortunately this silence is not due to the lack of anything to complain about, but rather the lack of time to express my complaints in this blog. At least I have been able to make regular posts to another blog, the B-List.

So I guess I'm writing a rant about not having the time to write a rant. I hope to rectify this problem and start posting proper rants on a more regular basis.