Less than or equal to?

Sometime in the distant past (OK, about 7 years ago) we were in the market for Melbourne real estate. At that stage I set up an 'alert' at realestate.com.au asking to be emailed when properties came onto the market in the East Malvern area for under $250,000 .This was just before the property market really shot up, so when I put it in this was a plausible price but six months later it was just silly and I never got a hit and I never bothered cancelling it.

Now, years later, I find myself from time to time getting an email announcing houses that match my price request.

When I look, I find they are prices on the market at $2,490,000.

Out by a factor of exactly 10.

I really don't want to know what their database is like.

ABS Census Data - Part 2

I have just finished downloading about 35 files from the ABS website. It was made a little easier by discovering a hack.

When you get to the final step there is a link to click to download the Excel spreadsheet (which has its name truncated up to the first space and doesn't have a file extension - but that is another story!). If you have a closer look at a link you will find that it has a very long URL full of all sorts of interesting information. If you had time you could parse it all, but the interesting bit is the final parameter:

&areacode=LGA27450

This is brilliant because if you know the LGA codes, which in my case I happen to find in a spreadsheet I created ages ago, then it is a simple manner to change this to the desired code and up pops the download box for the next LGA.

Much better.

ABS Census Data

I am pretty mad with the ABS at the moment. I am trying to get some data from the last Census which I think is pretty reasonable.

Basically what I want is for each Local Government area in Melbourne and Sydney data on the number of cars owned by the size of the household. For example, how many 3-person households have 1 car vs 2 or 3 cars. This seems a reasonable thing to want.

However, for some reason, the ABS is fixated with *dwelling* structure, rather than *household* structure. In the "Basic Community Profile" data, which is widely available electronically, they insist on breaking down car ownership by dwelling type. For some reason they think people want to know how many cars families that live in separate houses have compared with families that live in units or semi's or flats.

Now the data that I want actually *is* available. It is in the "Expanded Community Profile", where they breakdown car ownership by dwelling type (again) but also by household size. However, there are still problems.

The most useful source of census data is CData2001, which is the GIS system that the ABS has sold to various libraries. It takes a while to understand, but once you do it is very powerful. Unfortunately, the Expanded Community Profile is an 'add on' pack that none of the libraries that I have access to (Murdoch, UWA, State Library WA) have purchased.

The alternative is to go to the ABS website. For a long time, this data was available, but at a cost. Recently, they have stopped charging, which is good. What is *really bad* is that in the last few months they have redesigned the website. Instead of having all the data organised hierarchically with simple drill down to the right level and then save to Excel one by one, they have put in a funky search engine. Now for each LGA I have to (a) type in the name (correct spelling, of course) and then click half a dozen times in different places to get the right data for my spreadsheet, then save, then return to the top and do it all again for the next LGA. What used to take 10 seconds to set up then 5 seconds for each spreadsheet (plus download time) now takes at least 30 seconds for each, plus download. Given that I will be downloading about 100 overall, I am not happy. I have written to complain, but I doubt they will do anything.

I hope the results will make it all worth while!

I have tickets!

Well sort of, e-tickets actually.

I had to drop Tokyo from this trip - it turned out to be just too expensive. I've substituted a side trip in Europe to Berlin instead. I will get one long haul and (at least) one short haul flight on each of BA, Qantas and Finnair, plus a transcontinental on American so it should be interesting to compare.

Luckily this came in at only $20 more than the original, which is a relief.

If anyone's interested, the itinerary is

PER-SIN-LHR-TXL* (QF/BA/BA)
TXL-LHR (BA)
lots of train trips
LHR-HEL-JFK** (AY***) - SFO (AA)
SFO-SYD-PER (QF)

All very exciting. Rather hard to concentrate on serious work at the moment as a result :)

* Berlin, Tegel airport for non aviation geeks
** New York, JFK airport for ditto
*** Don't ask me why, but this is the code for Finnair

Not happy Jan

It turns out that the itinerary for my holiday (as booked and paid for on Friday) made it all the way to ticketing stage before someone from the airline decided it wasn't valid. Apparently, the fare I booked is not valid via Tokyo if you are coming back via the USA (which makes it useless as a round-the-world fare if you can't go round the world).

So now I am back to looking at new itineraries at different fares, which will of course be more.

Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn.

Booked

PER-NRTxHND-KIX-HEL-LHR-SFO-SYD-PER should get me a few frequent flier points

and a lot of jet lag

and max out my credit card.

Stuff it. I deserve a break. (I hope I don't sound like the Radio Rentals guy)

Next: hotels.

Does anyone know a decent hotel in Machynlleth?

Damn

I didn't get the Brisbane job. After 3 interviews, 2 trips to Brisbane (the last one paid for by them), and having references checked, I really thought I had it.

The one good thing is that my emotional state is currently so low anyway that I am not really able to get depressed about this news.

Holidays, and airfare madness

As people who know me know, I am pretty busy at the moment juggling two projects for PATREC. Also, if everything goes well, I'll be off to Brisbane at Christmas/New Year for a new job. I really need a decent holiday, and luckily there is a short period of about 2 weeks in mid September that I should be able to squeeze some time out.

After a lot of hum-ing and hah-ing I finally decided that I would like to spend a week in San Francisco, and since I have so little time, and it is so far away, I also decided that I would splurge a little and fly business class.

Now, from the West coast of Australia (Perth) to the US there are really only two sensible travel options: fly Qantas to Sydney and then onto San Francisco, or fly Air New Zealand to Auckland and transfer there for a flight onto S.F.

On neither of these is the fare exactly cheap. In both cases I was looking at something in the vicinity of 11 to 12 thousand dollars. I looked at flying via Asia, but this turned out to be more complicated and even more expensive. The only city in Asia that I would really like to visit at the moment anyway is Tokyo.

So I started looking around a bit and at a whim checked out some of the "round the world" prices at Bestflights.com.au. It turns out that a basic round the world business class airfare on either Star Alliance or OneWorld can be got for something in the vicinity of $9,000 - a good $2000 cheaper than my PER-SFO ticket would be. Even more amazingly, it appears that there is a fare available that would give me PER-TYO-HEL-LON-SFO-SYD-PER for around $7000.

So there you have it. By combining a few destinations I would like to visit, rather than just picking one of them I can save 40%!

I have confirmed with Bestflights that this fare is valid. Unless I hear bad news from my project manager today, I will try booking it tonight.

So simple

Such a nice simple convenient thing. Pay the bus driver and you get a ticket. Then show it again each time you get on. No swiping, tagging or validating.

It is all going to change, I expect. They are going to smart cards, I think.

Sigh.