timed local phone calls

Telstra have been pushing for timed local phone calls for ages. Well they have snuck them in for public telephones. There is no notice on the booths of the change. There didn't seem to be any public announcement or control by coward's government. They simply snuck it in.

How long till we get the same for private phones? Bastards!

What pisses me off is the outrageous profits they already make. It actually costs the same to make a long distance call in Australia as it does to make a local one, in fact your calls are often routed the long way around to get where it is going without you knowing it. Long distance calls should really be flat rate. Even worse, it is cheaper to run a mobile service that a land line service, yet the charges for mobiles are obscene! Thieves and con artists!

non-animated gifs

I visited Mum & Dad today and was showing Mum the truchet tiles I'd been doing. All worked fine till I showed her the one with the animated gifs where the little red spots move around. The spots weren't moving. Odd. I looked into it and found out eventually that ZoneAlarm, the free firewall program, has a setting that stops gif from animating. I'm not sure why someone would want that, but it seems to be set by default. Disabling that fixed the problem.

So if you looked at that truchet tile experiment and found yourself staring at a bunch of stationary dots wondering what the deal was, you probably need to fix that... if you want to see my moving red dots in all their marvellous glory. :)