At last! Our Census is going electronic

24 07 2006

Australia has a Census every 5 years. Usual stuff. An army of census people deliver tonnes of census booklets to every household in Australia over the next couple of weeks, we fill in the forms on the night of Tuesday August 8, then the army of collectors comes back and picks up all the booklets and off they go for scanning and analysis.

I remember back in 1996 and again in 2001 questioning why they didn’t offer an online option for the census. 1996 would’ve been too early as the internet uptake was pretty low at that time and speeds were achingly slow compared to today, but it would’ve made a lot of sense in 2001.

Well, here we are – it’s 2006, and this year Australians will be able to take part in the census electronically! Cool!

On reading the FAQs on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, it looks like they’ve got the “I’ve already filled it in” situation covered (http://tinyurl.com/ehswq). So I hope it works well. It would be good to save a few trees and to get this data written straight to the database. Over time, this should not only save a lot of taxpayer money but provide more responsive feedback to city planners and the like as I’d expect that the demographic trends etc. will be available much quicker.


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Categories : Life stuff

The good Dockers came out to play yesterday

24 07 2006

I tossed up whether to go to the footy yesterday. It was another gorgeous winter’s day – sunshine, almost cloudness, warm-ish (compared to Saturday when it was BLOODY COLD) – but Paul wasn’t playing and two of my nieces and nephews weren’t going to go. If Michelle and Craig had pulled out too, I wouldn’t have gone. Going to the game is a shared experience for me; I don’t think I’d enjoy it too much if I was sitting by myself surrounded by 4 empty seats.

So anyhow, I went. And Michelle and Craig turned up. And we had a great time. This time ‘the boys’ played like a team – you could feel their spirit, and the crowd responded in kind. It was a much more up-beat match than the one two weeks ago against Essendon which the Dockers won by 40 points, but which was as flat as a pancake emotionally.

Oh, and the Dockers won too, by about 30 points. So we keep our position in the top 8 with only 6 games to go. ‘Carn the Dockers!


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Categories : Aussie Rules Football