zerosleeps

July has come around once again and as every Australian knows that means tax return time, and that means the annual zerosleeps whine about the ATO’s grip on technology.

The good news this year is that there’s a OS X version of E-Tax. Yay! But, oh, wait, what’s that I see on the ATO’s system requirements page for Mac?

Computer processor: Intel Pentium or equivalent

Hmm, not off to a great start since Apple have never put chips under the Pentium branding in their machines. And here’s another warning bell:

VoiceOver – Not recommended. Due to significant complexities identified, VoiceOver does not work correctly with e-tax.

That tells me the OS X version of E-Tax isn’t using standard OS X development tools.

What’s more worrying than any of this is that the ATO seem to be ploughing resources into developing desktop applications for private tax returns rather than building a web application for the same thing. I sure would love to learn more about the Office’s reasons behind this.

I had to see it to believe it, and here’s the proof. It does snow in Australia. The photo is me standing in a place called Thredo in New South Wales’ Snowy Mountains.

Here’s something which I’ve never seen outside Australia. See the string of red lights above the parked cars? Red means the space is occupied, green means it’s free. The information about free spaces is also displayed on matrix signs at every junction.

Instead of driving up and down rows, you can just follow the signs and glance down each row until you spot a green light.

Unnecessary? Maybe. But it sure does make finding a space more pleasurable in busy city multi-storey car parks.

I deeply regret not taking a tripod of any sort up with me. This picture is probably the best of a bad bunch.

If I cared or knew anything about sports I’m pretty sure living in a former olympic park would be very different. For example, tomorrow night is Game I of the 2013 State of Origin, where… um, teams play each other at sport… right here at the ANZ Stadium in Sydney Olympic Park. It seems to be a pretty big deal.

I may be clueless, but I can still look at the pretty lights. These buildings aren’t normally this blue.

Wikipedia says the New South Wales rugby league team are also known as the Blues. That could explain it I suppose.