Curing the curse of shrapnel

The newspaper today has this article, which to me is some of the best news I've heard in a long long time: they're talking seriously about scrapping the 5c coin, and rounding prices in shops to the nearest 10c at the cash register (like what we do with rounding to the nearest 5c now - for international readers, the total amount is rounded, not the price of every item). I see this as being a wonderful idea, and really don't mind paying a couple of cents extra per trip to the supermarket if the rounding happens to send the price up rather than down. Although, I usually use a credit card anyway, and they don't round the totals for electronic transactions...

Loose change is one of my personal bugbears - Australia doesn't have the handy coin-counting-and-converting-to-real-money machines that some parts of the world do, so if you've got a pile of change, you're stuck with it. I just checked the size of my pile of useless 5c coins by a quick and dodgy method using my kitchen scales ($1 in 5c coins is about 60g by my scales, so a rough total can be calculated by just weighing the whole pile and dividing by 60... which is way faster than counting them!) - I've got about $12 in 5c coins that have accumulated in the 2 years or so since I moved into this apartment. Yes, I could go to the bank and try to get them turned into real money, but I've never yet gotten around to it, and the bank tellers look really weirdly at people who do things like that. Parking meters, tram ticket machines, vending machines and all those sorts of things don't accept them - the tram machines don't specifically say that they're not accepted, but last time I tried to use a handful of them to get a tram ticket, most of them fell straight through the machine without registering, and the machine timed out and cancelled the transaction before I managed to feed enough of them into it.

And yes, part of my annoyance with loose change is the fact that, because I travel quite a lot, I've accumulated miscellaneous coins in about 15 different currencies. I like to hang onto international (small-denomination) banknotes, and I do often drop my last few cents/pennies/pesos/whatever they're called into charity collection bins at the airport (or hand them to a busker on the street when I'm about to go to the airport - which is actually my preferred option, because I like buskers, and sympathise with them, having spent quite a bit of time busking myself) - but I still end up with miscellaneous coinage rattling around in the bottom of my backpack at the end of every trip. I like to use a ridiculously-worthless banknote (generally worth 10c or less) as a bookmark - my current bookmark is a Chinese 5-jiao note, worth about 9c in Australian money I believe. My previous one was a Peruvian one that I actually found inside a library book, never having been to Peru - it was from a currency that was actually no longer in circulation, so literally not worth the paper it was printed on - but I lost that along with a library book that I left on a plane a couple of years ago, which was a moment of sadness...

And on an entirely unrelated matter: I'm also celebrating the arrival of a new laptop battery, which means I'm back up to about 3 hours of battery life, from a previous low of ~40min because my old battery was dying. Dipping below 50mins was a problem, because that's how long it needs to last in my lectures...