The Hood

Went to a client training site today (my work is quoting on a new sales tool for that company, and we were checking out their current tool) and it was a room full of iMacs. This is the room where they train new sales people on their products and how to sell it.

However each one is running Windows XP! They had also been been stripped out of useful programs (not even paint or wordpad remains) and were running at 1280×768 for some reason (native resolution for 20 inch iMac is 1680×1050). The actual sales tool runs really slowly, even though it runs over a 100Mbps network (this was one of the many reasons for the rebuild).

I suppose this was the company that migrated to a brand new .Net based billing system (”Windows is cool”). The deployment was delayed by a year because it didn’t work (and still doesn’t work properly months later: still much slower than their old system and lots of bugs).

I have found the best pizza: from Oxenford near Movie World on the Gold Coast. We have it every fortnight. Mmmm

My car is broken down. The first time this week I was able to leave work on time and now the car won’t start! I’m sitting here waiting for RACQ to show up…

I haven’t even gotten around to adding a theme to this site yet and they release a new version. Oh well, the upgrade was painless, at the same time I changed the URL to make it as short as possible with my domain…

I was mostly unaffected, except having no mobile phone reception for the entire morning. My work internet and phones are through other companies and we didn’t notice anything. The Boss was out of the office and his mobile is through Three so we couldn’t call him. No great loss.

The housemate also called to tell me the power was out. My thought was that as Origin Energy have never issued a bill (after 5 months living here) they finally disconnected us. But it turned out he is an idiot and washing the jaffle maker with it plugged in and it tripped the safety switch…

(This is a little later than I originally hoped)

The Australian IT News has a feedback/discussion area but I have not been able to get it to work.

This is my reply to “iPhone: Telstra can’t beat Optus”

Telstra charges $2 per megabyte (!!!) on their standard plan. When I viewed that page it was around 700KB (according to Firebug) which means Telstra users would be charged $1.40 to view a single news article. With $10 a month of “data credit” one would be up for extra charges in no time.

This is the same as other Telstra plans, namely the $29.95 per month which allows 200MB of downloads, with excess at 15c/MB ($150/GB). This plan is available on both 256kbps and 8Mbps cable, so the allowance can be gone in only a few minutes, leaving many with huge excess bills. (Ignoring the fact they charge for uploads, extra email addresses, etc)

Telstra: proudly ripping off people who don’t know better. (aka people who think the Great Wall of China was built to keep the rabbits out)

I often can’t sleep. It can take me hours to get to sleep at night, even actively trying to think of “nothing” or the usual tricks like counting sheep. If I’m woken up I often can’t fall asleep again easily.

Which is why I’m up at 5am. I was awoken by the puppy’s alarm. She was given a small clock to simulate her mother’s heartbeat but her chewing it keeps bumping the alarm switch so it went off.

I work for a small interactive media company and the Boss announced that he is upgrading all our Windows based PCs to shiny iMacs! They arrived yesterday so I’ve been playing around with Leopard and spent a whole day installing software and stuff and getting used to the differences. I’ve haven’t had an Apple system as my primary system before. I’m used to using Windows XP and Linux. (More on Linux use in another article)

Along with being the token IT guy, my main role is PHP Developer and for this I’ll probably be retiring the 700MHz P3 development server (currently running Gentoo Linux: setup by my predecessor). I should be able to easily run Apache, MySQL and PHP on my new iMac. I’m also looking forward to doing some iPhone development.

One thing I still need to figure out: nicely managing updates for the iMacs: Of our 6 workers 5 are now using some form of Mac (3 new Intel iMacs, 1 Intel MacBook Pro and 1 G5 Mac Pro) so there will be a lot of the same downloaded. We only have a 1.5Mbps ADSL connection in the office, and I would need to setup a cache or something.

The guys didn’t let me download the 561MB 10.5.4 Combo update so I just downloaded the offline version at home where I have an ADSL2+ connection at around 8Mbps. The iMac came with 10.5.2 but the iPhone SDK requires at least 10.5.3 so I couldn’t install it yesterday.

So by COB yesterday I had most of the daily software I use installed: Eclipse and Firefox (with extensions) being the main ones. I’m still waiting for Flash and the rest of the Adobe Create Suite to arrive before I can migrate properly.

I’m planning on using this blog to just discuss things I’m interested in and reply to other websites that don’t have comments etc. This is all about me and I also plan on telling Anon a few little secrets here and there about my life.