Ticketing - Fail

Here in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, our public transport system is far from perfect. The trains and buses that I catch to work each day are slow and unreasonably crowded. All I can really say in their favor is that they are only rarely delayed by more than 10 minutes, and only rarely are they cancelled. However, more than once, I have missed a train because I simply couldn't get through the doors due to over-crowding.

Public transport here is also expensive. As a result, our trains and stations are policed by small tribes of trench-coat-clad transit police who will gladly dispense large fines to those who are not in possession of a ticket. They are also notorious for being heavy-handed. I don't blame the individual transit police themselves; they're clearly under-staffed and over-worked. I hope readers can see that I'm describing a larger problem here.

The tickets themselves work by a process known as "validation". You insert the ticket into a machine, and the machine prints the date and time of the next expiry of the ticket. This information is also encoded in a magnetic strip that runs down the side of the ticket. Simple right? What could possibly go wrong?

A couple of weeks ago, this validation process failed me. I inserted my ticket into a machine, only to receive it back without a printed date stamp! I was fully aware that if I were to be stopped by one of the transit police, they would only see me as being in possession of a ticket that had not been validated. I would have no proof that I had actually validated the ticket and the machine had failed. Knowing this, I decided to buy a new ticket, and pay for my journey twice, rather than risking a large fine or a discussion with an unreasonable, dim-witted individual.

However, the proof of the machine failure is clearly evident in the picture of the ticket. Where the second trip (and second expiry date of the ticket) should appear, I have a blank line. I assure you that, even though I am entirely capable of it, there is no photographic trickery at work here. The machine simply failed me. Clearly, the magnetic strip encoding did not fail, and kept a record of my validation. Unfortunately, however, the transit police have no way to inspect the magnetic strip, so that would have been useless to me.

In the past, I've heard people claim that they tried to validate a ticket and it didn't work. The transit police still fined them. Now I wonder: were some of them actually telling the truth? I pay some $2500 to ride the trains each year. For that kind of money, I should have enough room at least to stand on a train when a seat is not available; I should have courteous, reasonable transit police; and I should have a ticket machine that works. So, of those three, let's see what I do have: Fail, Fail, and... oh yes, Fail.

Ego boosting news paper scans!

To anyone actually following this blog; sorry about the very slow rate at which I post here.
I figure it is better to do less posts, with lots of substance, than more posts that are just pointless and completely uninteresting.

Also, I've been working like 15 hours a day on my final semester uni project, which is sending me slightly mental, so I haven't had time to try anything else constructive (I'll make sure to post some updates on how that is going a bit further down the track).

Anyway, since a couple of friends have been asking to see them, I thought I'd better scan-in-and-upload a few of me super famous news paper appearances of the last few weeks.

So here you go:

This was the first one to be published, the guys from the Extra:Tech section of the Herald sun decided to do a short write up for the July 16th news paper:


Soon after that, The Australian called me to ask a few questions, they also sent out a photographer to get some snaps, this article was published on the front page of the Higher Education section in the 23rd of July paper.

Also that week, the Moonee Valley Community News called as well as the Leader, to organise a photographer to be sent out , unfortunately I was going away on a ski trip with some friends that week, so the leader wasn't able to get a photographer out in time, but the community news was able to.

The photographer from the community news was really nice and totally took the best pictures I reckon (the guys from the bigger papers were a lot older and kind of hostile).
So I totally hit the front page of the local paper as you can see here:

And there was a photo of both me and Emily on page 12.
Holy crap, I am so pasty white in this picture, you can't even see where my T-shirt ends and my arm starts....

So yeah, all this has been quite beneficial for me, especially since I am finishing uni in a few months and will be looking for a job soon, and any publicity is good publicity.

I reckon the coolest part so far though is hearing from other people who have been inspired to make their own giant videogame accessories and stuff.
That's a pretty fucking cool feeling; inspiring people.

My favourite so far is definitely Matt from http://scadinc.blogspot.com/ who has (apparantly just finished) making a giant SNES pad.
That thing looks fucking awesome, I'm pretty impressed by how he has done the round edges, that's a whole lot of gap filler he must have used there...
The only problem I've got is the colours, he totally should have done the PAL/Jap colours, the US version of the SNES just looked like arse, with it's pansy purple colours.
But either way, that takes nothing away from his awesome craftsmanship.

Oh also; every asking for a wiring diagram for the controller;
There is none! Just locate ground on the pad and wire it to the ground wire in the buttons, then link each of the "active" (or whatever you call them) wires to their corresponding ones.
The Male/Female plug was just so that I could unplug the controller from the original.
Either way, I might post a tutorial in the future explaining how to wire old controllers into USB-computer controllers, so you can play NES/SNES/Megadrive etc. emulators with their original controllers.

Till next time, awesome.