photo by vincentq

Dear Perth Airport,

I have oft ragged on you before, but I must say, my recent trip through the international terminal was surprisingly decent. Since the not-so-great renovation of early ’09, the food sucks less, and the couches (couches!) and showers (showers!) are a nice touch.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re still lame. Copying Sydney’s oh-look-now-I’m-in-duty-free thing is annoying, the lack of facilities for connecting flights saddens me, and public transport, *ahem*.

But my expectations were pretty low, and they were exceeded! (… a little bit)

Sincerely,
a weary traveller.

Forgive me a way-overdue (and backdated) post, but I’m still one of the top Google results for this, so I figure I ought to post something.

Back in November, the Barnett government released a newly-tweaked plan for “the Link”, the development site next to Perth train station. From the scant detail available, the plan doesn’t suck, and is of course better than what’s there now. But it’s also meagre in foresight (what good’s more open space without stuff around it to draw pedestrians?), and it still has the unfortunate feature of the railway not being underground all the way (alas, the promised Federal funding doesn’t go that far).

Likewise, the new waterfront plan announced a fortnight later is quite reasonable, and probably more realistic than the Carpenter government proposal, but still so far-off in funding and timelines that I expect no end of change between now and the start of construction.

Continuing with the dog theme: this cute little sign is in a park in Boston that was created by the Big Dig (an über-expensive project to put the city centre’s main freeway underground).

• I am very late to this link, but if you haven’t seen this comic explaining why Obama won a Nobel Prize, you should!
• I’m also late to tell the story of the first (and only) rain the San Francisco area has had this season: basically, it was a piddling mid-size shower, and yet it shut down major roads and cut power to thousands of homes
• In other San Francisco news, the foggy city’s mayor dropped his bid to run for California governor next year. Gavin Newsom has made plenty of people unhappy already (city residents complain about things like crime and homelessness, for instance) — but even after losing his Mr Sheen status, he still stood out amongst a fairly lacklustre field. There seems depressingly little hope for a leader who can drive home the changes California needs to, y’know, function properly.
• Speaking of the governor — the current one, that is — there’s been plenty of chatter online about the hilarious letter he wrote to exercise his veto on a recent bill.
• And speaking of San Francisco, allow me to put small worries like an ill-planned triathlon in Perth into context. Until yesterday, the main bridge into the city was closed for almost a week — dumping n00b riders on an already-busy subway system, and throwing egg on the face of the state agency responsible for its (still-delayed) reconstruction. Nobody’s happy that it took so long to fix a crack that was already supposed to be fixed, at least until it got windy …
• And finally, I’m saddened that it took an (admittedly spectacular!) fire to draw attention to the great big oil spill off the West Australian coast. It’s clearly screwed up the ocean environment (hopefully temporarily, if the oil is cleaned up), so I assume there’ll be consequences for the company involved? So far all they’ve had is part of the bill and some bad PR, and I don’t see strong signs there’s anything more to come.

So, @thesixthbaron was in SF, on his way back from a conference. We met up, wandered the Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park, and it was cool.

Then I went to catch the bus back to my train station. At first I was entertained by staring out the window and listening in on the two Aussie tourists sitting opposite me who couldn’t quite figure out how to convert time zones. But then we stopped in North Beach, they got off, and a hipster girl came on and took their spot.

And then she motioned to her dog, which jumped up on the seat next to me.

There are many reasons I’m grateful that Facebook returned the news feed to its former coolness today. But perhaps the most important is that it was how I learned about the passing of Mike Neville, who at UWA was the person most responsible for getting me working with computers at all.

I echo Alex’s thoughts — he was a great bloke who’ll be sorely missed, and he absolutely deserved more time. But with what time he had, he was a dedicated mentor to many, and I always valued his counsel; more management-ey types (for he was never really one of them) would’ve probably used platitudes like “change agent” and “thought leader”.

And he believed in technology’s power to be at once cool, and able to change the world. Even with something as small as the home page of Facebook.