Yesterday was a little strange.

My client here is Emergency Communications Victoria, which helps the police, fire and ambulance staff in Melbourne with their communications needs.

We were in the Tally Ho center, which is where the fire and ambulance dispatch is located, so while I was doing normal OpenNMS stuff, in the background I was listening to the equivalent of live, 9-1-1 calls.

When you hear “Is she breathing?” for about the tenth time in a hour, it gets a little weird.

I guess its time for the “conservation update” where I talk about how the country I am visiting handles scarce resources.

This part of Australia is in the middle of a drought (although it seems that it has rained all week), and they have never really had a surplus of fresh water. So all of the toilets have two buttons on them: one for a “half” flush and one for a “full” flush. I’m not sure what happens when you press both. What’s strange is that in the men’s room, the urinals tend to share a button to flush – i.e. one button will flush two urinals at the same time.

Bicycling is big here, and all of the major roads also have bike paths. My host, Euan, bikes to work most days.

But as this is a big country, the cars are much closer in size to those in the US than I have seen in other countries. Petrol is at AU$1.05 a liter, or about US$2.60/gallon. Instead of SUVs however, they have Utes, which look like El Caminos (car bodies with a truck bed). Utes are not very fuel efficient, as the fashion is to put very large engines in them.

Overall, I’d say Australia is a little ahead of the US on the conservation front, but not as far advanced as, say, Japan.