On my way in this morning, on the bus I checked, after all the reports still no sign of Google Chrome, it was supposed to be here but alas noting to look forward to on my last day in at work before some much needed holidays.

I have been reading about this new browser for the last couple of days, and most of the development was delivered in a 35 page story in comic form detailing all the ideas and processes that lead to the new program. It interested me and I couldn’t wait for the release today.

Then I got to my desk, one more check… Wow, the page is now there and the program is ready for download. So that’s exactly what I preceded to do and my first are impressions are as follows…

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What a liberty…

The Connex group who has the primary contract for running metropolitan railways services here in Melbourne, after months of discussing options on how to ferry more passengers, after amending their timetables to help just a little, who back-stepped on rejecting bicycles on trains, who haven’t yet delivered on their promise to remove seats and call commuters land sardines, have now come up with a brilliant plan to make rail commuting a wondrous thing…

They are going to change the seat covers.

Yes, bright new seat covers to some 43,000 seats are going to make the conditions better. No more sitting on torn seats, or ones with holes, they will now be comfortable, at least to those who can actually get a seat, we still have many more standing-sardine commuters yet to satisfy. Perhaps some new floor coverings for those on their feet?

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I reluctantly caved in today and did the iTunes and Quicktime update that the Adobe update software has been bugging me about for a while now.

Big downloads later and some screen refreshes, all the software that I never use updated.

The updater asked if I wanted to restart, thanks Adobe, this is why I upgraded to Vista so I didn’t have to restart after every application update, and since I am in the middle of doing other things, no I don’t want to restart thanks. Cancel is my option (what ever happened to Yes and No answers to simple questions?), and off goes the program, checking for other updates…

What? Didn’t we just go through this?

Oh yeah, I forgot, another reminder about installing Safari 3.1.1.

No, I don’t want this software, I have unchecked it before, I have IE and I have Firefox thanks, I don’t need another 23Mb of unused crap on my hard disk that I will eventually need to update.

But what got me even more today was the description of this item (See Pic).

OK, looks a little broken, and if they can’t make a read-about-me text file work in their recently updated updater then how can the application be trusted?

Look Apple, I don’t want this program, I don’t even want iTunes, I need quicktime only because I have a great olympus camera that records in mov format.

Like the DOJ said to Microsoft, “The People don’t want all these other things included or else you will deemed to be anti-competitive”!

How can one company get away with this when another can not, and has already been convicted and sentenced for doing exactly the same thing?

So now I uncheck the Safari item, the Install button goes gray leaving me with just the ‘Quit’ option. Apple, please add another option for me…

‘Leave Me Alone’ – Save my options and my preferences and close the program so that I am never bothered by your application based spam again please. Is that too much to ask?

No sooner do I write on the problems of our public transport, it gets an actual nudge on the side of improvement. After all this time, a new schedule will be rolled out, from later this month toward the rest of the year introducing new and extra runs increasing services in real terms and also changing the route some of the services take when they get to the city, avoiding the loop and making the journey a bit quicker. Check the whole story.

These are real changes that will improve the situation, for many of our branches the train serves delivers people to.

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