Friday            Max 22  Shower or two.    
17/09/11  Min 10  Max 25  Shower or two developing.    
18/09/11  Min 12  Max 21  Sunny.    
19/09/11  Min 11  Max 27  Showers developing. Windy.
20/09/11  Min 12  Max 20  Shower or two.     
21/09/11  Min 13  Max 22  Morning shower or two.    
22/09/11  Min 12  Max 24  Mostly sunny.

Summer.

In September.

It’s a good thing that global warming is a beat up by the greens, a front for communist interests trying to take control of our lives and introduce excessive and unneeded regulation – or else I might be worried.

Two programmers looked at each other, thought about how they value their time and the response was a no-brainer:

“We’re programmers,” I explained, “we’ll take the paper form.”

“There’s a phone number you can call if you have any trouble filling out the electronic form” reassures the collector.

Cathy thinks: “Sure, that line won’t have any trouble when twenty million Australians simultaneously log into the web site to fill in the forms via a broken SSL link, using IE specific controls (that only work under some versions Windows assuming they’re correctly patched and have the right libraries loaded), demanding full round-trips to the underspec’d Windows servers to populate unnecessarily complex custom controls, some of which will no doubt demand Flash or COM. Come to think of it, it probably won’t even be web based, and we’ve only got two Windows boxes, one of which is tucked under a table (Yay! Census night on the floor swearing at the ABS’s programmers!) and the other has a screen resolution that went out with buggy whips (I’ve had programs barf and refuse to run because the resolution was unacceptable).”

We chose paper. For another view of the world, I’m looking forward hearing to how census night worked for Daniel…

It’s almost certainly actually AEDT.

A summary of the abbreviations, which looks reasonably official, is here: Australian timezones.

In summary, AEST, ACST and AWST apply in winter. AEDT, ACST and AWST apply in summer.

The other issue I had with a recent email was it said 12:00pm AEST. I think in this context, they meant midnight AEDT, but it’s confusing. Better to either say Midnight, or use 24-hour time: 00:00.

But why does it keep forgetting your region every few weeks, and reset itself to metro Sydney?

Very irritating. (Well, if you live outside metro Sydney.)

Using your web browser, you can check the cookies. This article describes how, in various browsers.

That’s where the problem is: it looks like the “TvFixGuide” cookie, which seems to hold details of what region you’re in, is only set for a month.

It doesn’t look like either browser allows you to extend the time range of the cookie, or otherwise modify it. I suppose there’s legitimate reasons for that.

It is possible to hack it by deleting the cookie, setting your computer’s clock, say, a year into the future, before going back to the site and setting the option.

Yep, it seems to work:

Don’t forget to set your clock back afterwards.

Sensis are nuts. They’ve totally shot themselves in the foot, and they’ve only got a limited amount of time to plug the gap before their Yellow Pages foot falls off completely.

Yellow Pages on the web doesn’t contain entries for all of the businesses listed in the physical Yellow Pages. Sensis charges businesses extra to list on the web. Not many have taken Sensis up on that option, meaning that YPW has remarkably few businesses listed – and because YPW has few businesses, consumers don’t turn to YPW to find businesses. And because of that, fewer and fewer businesses are listing… and so the death spiral goes.

If anyone there had one ounce of sense (sic), they’d be giving web listing away for free, or even negative price. For a while, while the network effect was being established. Then the charges would start hiking up, and the profits rolling in. But no, they had to try to be profitable before the monopoly was established. Bang! bang! Wow, my foot hurts.

I don’t think I was wrong.  When’s the last time you used the yellow pages online to find… anything?