Australia duped by Trujillo

When Chief Executive Sol Truillo leaves Telstra, he will have pocketed more than AUD$33mil and AUD$5.6mil in shares for fours years of work. This is how the company has performed:

........................................2005 ___ 2006 ___ 2007 ___ 2008
Net profit ($bil)...............4.3 _____ 3.2 _____ 3.2 _____ 3.7
Share price (close)..........5.06 ____ 3.68 ____ 4.59 ____ 4.24
Sales revenue ($bil).......22.16 ____ 22.71 ___ 23.67 ___ 24.66

From what I can see, Trujillo has only managed to maintain status quo. Whatever marginal increase in revenue is negated by a reduction in net profit.

From a national perspective, despite running the largest telco company in Australia, he has not made any impact to the Australian telecommunications industry: in the last 4 years, internet prices remain at its high cartel-like level of 2005; internet speed remains lagging behind almost all the developed countries; telephone line rental has crept up marginally; and mobile phone call charges remain at an unabated staggering cost. Trujillo has not shaken up the industry. He has not introduced the price and performance competition the government had hoped for when privatising Telstra. Rather, it seems that Trujillo has tried his best to squeeze as much profit out of the market as he could get, without investing in state-of-the-art infrastructure. This is not the mark of a high-powered superexecutive leader-statesman who is rewarded handsomely for staying on the job, and rewarded yet again when he leaves one year before his 5-year contract is up.

LPG stimulus for the economy

Here's an idea that may help stimulate the economy. We all know that Australia is a big producer of natural gas. The cost at the pump is conservatively estimated at 40% the price of unleaded petrol. If the government were to use part of the $42bil stimulus package to help local car manufacturers develop affordable LPG-powered cars, and then sell them at a subsidized rate to the public, it will go a long, long way towards stimulating the economy:

1. A typical household spending $250 a month on petrol will be able to save $150 each month.
2. The local car industry will get a head start in developing LPG-powered cars for the export market.
3. Reducing the import of crude oil will save foreign exchange. At the same time, exporting gas-powered cars will create a bigger export market for Australia's natural gas reserve.

Finally, if the government were to control the price of LPG at the pumps, I am confident that the price can even be reduced further. I have been going to a certain petrol station to fill up on LPG costing 36.8c per litre. Today, all of a sudden, the price shot up to 49.9c per lit, more or less in line with every other bowser in town. This gas smells of a cartel rat.

My conversion to LPG - continued

Here's how my car performs on LPG (disregard the earlier claim!):

Refuel date___ km traveled___ litres used___ lit/100 km

Suburban driving
19/2/09 ___ 156 ___ 25.72 ___ 16.51
22/2/09 ___ 181 ___ 26.81 ___ 14.81

Driving to Adelaide
22/2/09 ___ 536 ___ 52.58 ___ 9.81
23/2/09 ___ 715 ___ 75.31 ___ 10.53

Gauging from the last column, the fuel consumption is more or less on par with what I get out of unleaded petrol, both for suburban driving as well as for long distance driving. Hence the savings with LPG is more or less dependent on the price of LPG with respect to unleaded petrol.

LPG price varies GREATLY between pumps. In Melbourne, most pumps are currently charging between 49.9-52.9c/lit, while the lowest goes for 36.8c/lit. In Adelaide, all the pumps I saw were charging 62.9c/lit (great cooperation between retailers?). Along way to Adelaide, the prices were all consistently higher: from 69.9c/lit to a whopping 73.9c/lit in Keith! Interestingly, petrol price does not vary much from Melbourne and all the way to Adelaide. Even in Keith where LPG was 73.9c/lit, the unleaded petrol was 128.9c/lit, which goes to show that LPG prices appears are highly out of control. Does "profiteering" cross your mind?

(added on 3 Mar 09) If you wish to make a complaint about unfair pricing, make a call to the ACCC - Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. I just did. The telephone number is 1300 302 502.

My conversion to LPG

It took me a long time to convince myself to convert my Camry to run on LPG (liquefied petroleum gas). Now that I have done it, I wonder why I had such a huge mental block about LPG. The bottom line is: on my first refuel today, I paid a mere AUD$16.20 to fill up the LPG tank after clocking 390km of regular driving. Normally I would have paid about AUD$65 at today's price of AUD$1.19 per litre of unleaded petrol.

It cost me AUD$299 to do the conversion, after deducting the AUD$2000 rebate given by the government. With a saving of AUD$50 per week, I can recover my investment in 6 weeks. What a deal!

Barring any unforseen problems, my first week of driving on LPG has been a pleasant experience. My Camry has a 2.4lit engine; I do not perceive any loss of power running on LPG. Driving is as smooth as it was on petrol. I give a full thumbs up to LPG! It feels good to know that I can fight back at the ridiculous prices the bowsers are still charging. Although crude oil has dropped to US$35 per barrel, we are stil paying AUD$1.19-1.29 at the pump for unleaded petrol.

Note: the price of LPG seems to vary greatly between bowsers. At this time, for example, most places charge 52c per litre, while a couple I have seen have been charging 38c per litre all through the week.

A failed online album; again!

My online photo album http://ymhow.fotopic.net/ is shut down. There's nothing I can do about it, as it is a free service. I have not been able to access it recently, so I decided to find out what happened. Apparently the company was sold off in May 2008. The new company did not revive it and the domain name has been decommissioned. Fortunately I have organized my backup in such a way that I can easily set up a new album on another website.

My previous album was hosted by pbase.com . Initially free, it started charging a subscription after becoming hugely popular among photographers. As I did not update my email address with them, they were not able to inform me that they were removing my pictures since I did not subscribe. Thus I lost my first-ever online album, although I still have the photos. Those photos were all taken with my first digital camera, a quite unheard of Casio.

Lesson from this experience: always have a backup for whatever you keep in the computing "cloud". Free websites owe nothing to you in the event of a failure. Neither can paid web-sites compensate you for any loss. I will probably sign up with pbase.com and set up my album there in a couple of month's time.

p.s. (12 Feb 2009) Soon after I posted the above, the fotopic photo album site was activated again. So I will continue to use it.

Real and perceived enemies

18th century French satirist and philosopher says, "As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities." People are often used as the means to a political end. Just feed them absurdities and they will commit atrocities that you want them to, while the real enemies are left alone. All Malaysians should ask themselves who the real enemies are. Malaysia has seen its crime rate escalating exponentially, yet the biggest demonstrations in the country are race-based ones. Racial and religious hatred are fanned by zealots, while reprisals are simultaneously silenced by threats and actions. The demonstrators genuinely believe that their way of life is threatened both economically and religiously. How utterly misled they are! If the entire Chinese population disappear from Malaysia, would that change the real threats eroding the economic wellbeing of the demonstrators? Would that make their religious practice more free and meaningful? I do not think so.

The real enemies are the robbers, burglars, kidnappers, and corrupt officials. They seem almost unrestrained. They have no regards for human lives. They certainly do not discriminate on race or religion when carrying out their activities. Until people are educated on who the real enemies are, Malaysia will continue to be a haven for crime. Ultimately, the price is not just economic security or religious freedom, but ruin and anarchy for the entire country. In the worst case scenerio, Zimbawe took just 30 years to be totally ruined. Perhaps that should be made into a case study and taught to everyone in Malaysia.

For photographers: a book worth reading

My favourite section in the bookstore or the library is the photography section. Sometimes in browsing through the pages I would come across a fresh perspective, or a new idea to try out on my camera. That's what fuels my passion in photography. I recently read "A New Manual On Photography" by John Hedgecoe. In this book, the author covers more about light and colour control, than on picture composition, aperture or focal point. He DID cover those other points too (which photography book wouldn't?), but I felt this book gave a very useful expose on a fundamental aspect of photography which is often under-addressed. He shows how one can create a lovely shot in bright light or in dull light, in high key or in low key, in harsh light or in soft light.

Composition alone does not make a great picture. I've learned that it also requires colour control in the same way an artist would carefully choose what colour goes with the other on a canvas. I've also learned to appreciate how the angle and intensity of light hitting on a subject can make a difference. It never struck me until now that tonality, or differrent shades of the same colour, is the key to giving a two-dimensional image a three-dimensional impact. That, in my opinion, is the pursuit of artists and photographers alike.