Hurrah for Sydney CBD !
The new Premier, Mr Rees, in a bid to win public support from his fledgling popularity has proposed a Free city circle bus scheme that will run in Sydney CBD starting at noon today. This will help to alleviate the congestion from people using trains in the city circle route and also trains taken down for trackwork maintenance especially over the weekends. While this doesn't necessarily offer much advantage to city workers and dwellers since its starting time is at 09:30 am, it will serve as an advantage for tourists, backpackers and retired pensioners. Now of course if they can offer the bus service all the way to the beaches as well esp over the weekends ,  that will be a tremendous boost !

Mixed reactions on airline merger
One can't help feeling uneasy about this recent news. To-date, Qantas has been having crappy service and mishaps leading up to this announcement. With a merger, heads will definitely be rolling due to consolidation of operations for economic viability and good people could be laid off as a result although more flights could be centralized with a single ticketing system from one company as a result and airline fees might be on par with low-fare airlines with a reduction of administration costs once the two completed consolidation. Will this however, spell the demise of good service legacy in the airline industry for BA ?

Qantas could merge with British Airways, creating one of the world's biggest airlines.

British Airways has confirmed it?s exploring a potential merger with the flying kangaroo.

BA once owned 25 per cent of Qantas, but sold its stake four years ago.

The move would create one of the world's biggest carriers, worth $8 billion, and help both companies weather record oil prices and the global recession.

The merger talks follow the release of the federal government's aviation green paper, which suggested Qantas's foreign ownership cap could be removed. [source: http://www.livenews.com.au/articles/2008/12/03/Qantas_and_British_Airlines_moot_merger]

Job Jeer
Times are hard with layoffs everywhere. Job recruitment sites and portals are popping up everywhere and advertising the same jobs listed from the same company. Now obviously if the candidate isn't alert or aware, he/she might fall for the trap of applying to both recruitment agencies and getting sidelined by the real employer.  If you are new to the industry, you get even more crap. From a job portal website: IT Internship Program in Sydney CBD
  Join this IT internship program (unpaid) and be ripped off by us. You will be given uninteresting tasks while we give more interesting stuff to our other developers, otherwise they will leave our company.
 
This is a 3 month internship program, 2 hours a day, as long as you pay us the registration fee of $1000 we will be happy, times are tough even for a professional Web2.0 company like us. We will use the other 6 hours in the day for 3 other interns. That's $4000 a day we can make - and that is only on Monday. On Tuesday to Friday we can make another $4000 per day, giving us a cool $20000, thanks to desperate IT interns like you.
 
Hurry hurry, an offer this good won't last. Source: http://sydney.gumtree.com.au/c-Jobs-computing-IT-IT-Internship-Program-in-Sydney-CBD-Sydney-City-W0QQAdIdZ91558016

The sorry state of service in OZ
1.  Optus cable caused widespread outage 2. CBA error glitch caused widespread missing money 3. 200 Qantas passengers stranded overnight Perhaps the best controversial show on telly that can depict this lack of good customer service is the comedy series "Swift and Shift Couriers" shown on SBS every Monday 08:30 pm..one of their episodes below:

How to fix "winlogon.exe terminated unexpectedly. Error 00004a" BSD
Spent a couple of hours wasting time fixing this, these are my steps: 1. Boot up with a LIVE CD and try copying files from a good windows directory 2. If all fails from 1, check c:\windows\system32 for all files that had last timestamp when this error occurs. Try to isolate if there are any corrupt or false ini , dll or exe files and rename them and reboot . 3. Run HiJackthis and look at startup programs or keys which are suspicious. 4. Repair windows with Install CD..this may be least effective though... 4. Uninstall all recently installed patches from Microsoft..my findings so far seem to point to Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) although this has yet to be confirmed Lesson: surf the internet with another profile other than administrator !!