Mail+GPRS on Three

Looking for a way to get your mail, for free, while travelling?

On X-series able mobiles (they may have expanded this to all Three mobiles), you get free "3mail", even if you're not subscribed to X-series. Your address is firstname.lastname@three.com.au.

Three lets you check your "3mail" for free. Mail sent is included in your cap. Your phone accesses this mail using POP3 or IMAP.

So, it occurred to me, why not redirect your normal mail to your "3mail", and use GPRS to download your mail?

Free grapes

Today I was at Supabarn getting some fruit. While I was grabbing some apples I noticed 2 people in the space of a few minutes pick some grapes and eat them. And they weren't the people you would normally associate with theft. One was a well-dressed older lady and the other was a middle-aged asian lady. Has it somehow become socially acceptable to steal? I realise it's only grapes and would have only cost less than a dollar, but these people didn't even look guilty. What has happened to society or am I making too much of this?

Cost of churn vs. acquisition

Customer turnover ("churn") is costing Australian businesses more than $1.5 billion per year. But I'll bet companies are spending far more than that on customer acquisition.

Imagine how many marketing dollars are spent by the likes of Telstra and Netspeed on trying to get customers to join. If they spent a minute fraction of these marketing dollars on improving customer service (or improving the quality of the product itself), their bottom line would thank them.

More taxes without losing votes

If you were a politician and I told you that you had to raise $500 million through a new or raised tax, who would you impose that tax upon?

People that don't vote, of course.

Governments at all levels have decided that "teenage binge drinking" is the new "global warming". It's difficult to read a newspaper or magazine without coming across some shock story about drunken teenagers.

Economics at its finest

A reliable source says that the ACT Government imposed a "minimum drinks price" at pubs and clubs, in an effort to curb the binge drinking "epidemic" (I'll attack that one on another occasion...). This minimum drinks price is $3.00.

Presumably the government's "minimum drinks price" imposition bears some sort of financial penalty to establishments that don't comply.

And the clubs followed suit -- for about a month, or two. But recently, Academy has re-introduced the good old $2 drinks.

Climate "scientists" high: proof

As if we didn't need more proof that climate "scientists" were smoking crack. Yep, the same people who scream "man-made global warming" want to shower the atmosphere with sulphate particles.

Let's explore why this is an absolutely terrible idea. Firstly, even if their claims of "man-made global warming" are true, at the most, the effect on the earth is a passive one. Injecting sulphur into the atmosphere takes it from being passive to being very, very active.

Nokia Music Store: Epic Fail

Nokia's just opened an online music store in Australia, à la iTunes. Some news sites are even going so far as to dub it an "iTunes Killer". Unlikely.

I decided to check it out, to see if the claims held any water. Alas, I was greeted by disappointment. The Nokia Music Store fails on three fronts -- two of them are absolute deal-breakers. Firstly, it doesn't support Firefox. But that's fine, we'll just fire up IE (sorry, Mactards!).