Anyway. DK-20 is the eyecup part and it cost me all of $3.50 on eBay — it’s alarmingly genuine, too!

When I found it I was pretty thankful that the guy in Alice hadn’t had a clue… probably would’ve cost at least three times that!

These things can be had from PayPal for about five bucks. Or $7.50 if you’re an Aussie. Verisign will flog them off to you for $30, if you’d like, but basically PayPal rocks for this kinda stuff. It’s a one-time password token that effectively enhances your authentication by a massive degree. It’s cool because it works with PayPal and eBay. It’s cooler (and worthwhile) because you can potentially use it with OpenID.

Essentially, it’s a random number seeded with a unique key that gets appended to your regular password. This defeats keyloggers and pretty much all kinds of phishing currently out there. These kinds of devices have been used in corporate VPN/dial-in scenarios for years now (predominantly, in the situations I’m aware of, with technology by RSA SecureID), but this is the first I’ve seen of it from Verisign.

And, sure, it’s only as secure as physical security or the endpoints themselves are, but it’s a massive step up from “what’s your cat’s name?” two-factor auth (though, unfortunately, I think PayPal/eBay offer that as a backup).

I’ve ordered mine and will probably be having a play with OpenID implementations of it (backed by Verisign’s PIP service, but not overly tied to it because of OpenID’s identity-delegation ability) once it arrives (10 business days).

Can’t help but wonder what Verisign’s rates for these things are in a standalone sense. Normally on 5 year contracts, but in terms of cost-per-token. Seems like a great way to defeat the idiot users who insist on having passwords that are blatantly obvious (argue all you like about strength policies: it’s often not feasible when balanced against support load for resultant forgotten passwords).

Also, to those who argue PayPal = evil, if you’re in Australia then please… don’t. Unlike in the US, here they’ve basically got the same financial reporting obligations as any bank does, and customer service necessarily to match it. All the horror stories from the ‘States (not that I think them universally untrue!) pretty much couldn’t happen here or they’d be chucked out of the country. And, whilst they’re so heavily subsidising (or at least obtaining bulk discounts for) this kinda tech, that’s cool with me.

This image makes 60,000 indexed items. A fair whack of that would be email, but far out that’s a lot of information. (It’s not just a count of files on a system, that’s just indexed documents in my home dir, projects workspace, and email accounts)

New laptop arrives Monday morning, and I’m trying to decide if I even want to move everything off this desktop or not! The laptop has half a TB of disc space across 2 drives (17″ monster), so I’m considering it. I purchased it as a desktop replacement system and it is quite capable of that (specs at end of post)! The desktop provides a good backup should the laptop die/get stolen/run over by a bus, but at present the data is organised to be used, not archived.

By “used”, of course, I mean that liberally disorganised but most-recently-used-on-top sort of structure we fall into so easily. So I have a spot of sorting to do to get everything onto the laptop.

My last computer still has some stuff I’d like to get off it (particularly uni work… to the critics, yes, I do still go to uni!) but it’s been in at Youthworks not doing much since we moved offices, but heavy enough I haven’t bothered bringing it home again, since late last year.

The problem with desktops in particular is that they aren’t worth selling for their potential usefulness. My several-years-old computer (2.4GHz/768MB/somethingsomething… Ubuntu) in at Youthworks could maybe just sell for $350 given a clueless enough eBayer. My current desktop (no great slouch, AMD64 X2 4200+/2GB/7600GS) would be worth about the same to someone who knew what they were talking about… or perhaps $750 on eBay!

Even so — it’s useful to have spare machines ‘just in case’ (for production stuff especially). I’d love to be able to swap those two desktops for laptops of similar vintage, but it’s just never going to be cost-effective. When people get rid of laptops, it’s because they suck (falling apart/general abuse, crap battery life, rubbish specs to start with, etc.). Not so with desktops, wherein most faults are redeemable at minimal cost. And even that minimal cost is often negated by the fact that there’s so much in the way of ‘spare’ parts around the place!

This next couple of weeks will be fun… shooting a short film Saturday, Katy’s birthday that evening, somehow bidding in an eBay auction on Sunday morning whilst at TACKLES (might need to delegate that one!) to pick up some cheap lighting bars, continuing shoot Sunday afternoon, then I’ll be at work all week to catch up on the time I’ve been out of action because of exams/assessments, etc., and chase up all kinds of exciting things that have been on hold (including SMS stuff, yay!) for a conference in early December.

Then, next Saturday, there’s the FEVA Promoting the Word through Text and Image conference, which is plenty exciting and all the cool kids will be there, so get along to it if you can (it’s cheap for a media conference or about average for a Christian conference — worth it either way!)

Wednesday week there’s a performance on at Matthias by the drama kids (it’s a thing we do for networking with kids and parents in the local area more than anything, but it’s run by the kids ministry people at our church.) that shouldn’t be too high stress (at least for me) but I’ll be off work for a day for, then the next evening web-blast06 is being put on by the fine folks from WIPA (I’m going courtesy of hearing about it through WSG, not part of the elite that forms that organisation at present ;-)) at the Old Fitzroy, which is a fun little pub (and theatre) in Woolloomooloo. Which is all fun and games but weirdly suspended between high-priced real estate and the dodge-the-syringes bits of Sydney… shrug.

After that, I’ll hopefully cruise steadily towards the end of the year (December 14 for me, pretty much, coz I’m away til Christmas and it’s basically the New Year after that), finding a programmer and hammering out a bit more stuff for the early early parts of 2007 when development will (God willing) kick off in earnest. Last web thing for the year for me is going to be Webjam on December 12 at Hotel CBD (right down the road from where I used to work, actually) which should be a great deal of fun. I was tempted to try and present something but figure I’m in such a state of permanent verbosity I’d find it hard to do anything useful with three minutes. So I’ll be there heckling in the crowd :-) Should be great fun. If you’re keen to come along to either web thing drop a comment after you’ve RSVP’d (web-blast is full already, but Webjam appears to be open still) and we can arrange to meet up beforehand or something.

But I can’t get any work done until this exam is over because it makes me feel too guilty about not studying. Sigh. Incidentally, reading a great book on Tennyson and Madness (if only it were Madness and Modernism, but perhaps they’re occasionally synonymous!) by Ann Colley.

Colley, Ann C. Tennyson and Madness. The University of Georgia Press. 1983. if you’re interested — got some great stuff on his Maud monodrama which is the reason it got borrowed in the first place!

My money doesn’t go anywhere near as far on textbooks here as it would if we were fortunate enough to have books at the same price they are in the US. I’m trying to track down some Vygotsky works (and Fisher’s collection is categorised by emptiness, haven’t checked out UNSW yet but imagine it wouldn’t be much/any better) and don’t want to spend the earth to pursue what is, essentially, an entirely peripheral interest. So I can spend, you know, $190 on a decent text in Australia, or I can get that bundled with one other (also apparently excellent resource) for US$50 plus shipping from Amazon. It’s absolutely nuts.

One day someone will try to explain the economics behind this to me. And that day my head will implode with frustration.

Catch-all Adwords campaigns really backfire at times. Insert essay about consumerism as modern god here.

I saw the link on my Dictionary.com search (I still use it because it’s so much quicker+easier to understand than the OED at times, and I figure I’m only visiting because my brain is already cooking so there’s no point making things worse — who really knew what ontologically meant? Be honest…) and couldn’t help but click it, wondering who was paying for AdSense trying to convince people there is/isn’t a God (arguing that there is makes sense, but what gain is there in convincing people there isn’t?)… ah, eBay, of course.

So this is week #2 off work, with a fair amount of uni also not-attended so far this week (I managed an impressive three hours yesterday afternoon, and a lecture for the grammar english course on Tuesday evening, and managed to deliberately avoid, sleep through, or decide against attending the rest). I’ve a decent attendance record in most courses so far this semester so I didn’t bother with certs for the first half of the week… but then I had to go see a doc this morning about the eye and I’m supposedly on these meds for a week now. So, assuming they work in appropriate time, I’d still be rocking up to uni with a notoriously contagious thingy for the first half of next week… which means I might even end up missing more class. Which is ridiculous. Anyway I’ve got a lull in assessment at least… I was trying to write a pres earlier this week between phlegm-filled breaths, and ended up giving it unable to really speak… it’s about Renaissance thought in early modern Europe; unfortunately there was no opportunity to work in any plague allusions ;-)

Speaking of early modern Europe, there was the annual bookfest at University of Sydney from Saturday through to yesterday (Wednesday) which was so awesome. I say speaking of early modern Europe because I now have a collection on the subject (sans journal articles, etc., but there’s always Gale/ProQuest et al.) on par with that of Fisher library. The uni gets rid of low-circulation books, and also sells donations from the box you’ve probably walked past a thousand times and not really thought much about (if you’re a USyd student who at least pretends to study) on the way into Fisher on the left. Everything is dirt cheap… I went with Selo and we both by pure chance spent exactly $33, which netted us two A4 ream box sized piles of books. The first few days are prices as marked, but Tuesday it’s $10/A4 box, and on Wednesday it’s down to $5! I really wanted to go and have a look at what was left but wasn’t quite up to it. Everything is put out on Saturday so the collection would have seriously diminished by Wednesday, but given the sheer scope of it (it’s in the Great Hall of the Quad, and imagine if you will the entire floor space in there covered about three layers deep in books and you have an approximate starting number) chances are there’d still be some gems for the uncovering!

Yeah… so $33 would normally buy me five books, less if they’re academic reference/not classics/M&B (kidding). Did seriously well.

In other news, I’ve spent my recovery time battling with Wine to little avail. I tried installing it a few times (insert alcohol related jokes here) and got increasingly no-where, or sort of did, but then ended up hitting a brick wall (passed out in a pool of my own vomit, so to speak). So I installed Steam and spent $9.95 (USD! Tim was wrong, or at least Selo quoting Tim was wrong… either way, my receipt says USD) on Counter-Strike (to which I have moral objections, because the idea of spending money — even $US10 — on a free mod is preposterous) for the MCE computer which kicks butt (well, kicks butt once I figured out how to check the blindingly obvious “Widescreen” box).

Then I bought HL GotY pack on eBay that comes with four CDs or something and will hopefully install on Linux fantasically without Steam. Or, sort of with Steam but in a less-dependent-upon-it kind of way that makes everything run slightly happier. Good fragging times ahead, hopefully. Worst case I buy a decent wireless keyboard + mouse (yeah, one of those five-button things, I’m sold!) and use the MCE box instead… it’ll just mean higher framerates at the expense of having to walk downstairs, and probably a better gaming experience (can you say 5.1 and 32″ screen?) anyway. But it’s on Windows, and… insert idealistic rant here. Sigh!

Then my computer apparently turned itself off a day or two later, and I was slightly concerned. Being a well-trained tech-monkey, the first thing I did was check power. I’d kicked it out… just.

It was actually still in the power socket, and looking loose enough that it’d probably been moved out over a period of several days. So it occured to me that maybe it was actually so close I could have nudged it that day my hard-drive failed and caused a brown out… which isn’t actually that implausible, if a tad improbable.

Perhaps it’s not just about to die. Perhaps that’s what actually happened… perhaps.

Meanwhile, the computer is still perfectly fast (and would be faster if I gutted and reinstalled Ubuntu) if a little shy on storage space. 40GB is becoming increasingly cramped (even with an additional 10GB drive dedicated to OS + applications), and hard drives are SO CHEAP these days. I’ll probably save up for a bit to get a 250GB drive and a DVD burner, and a new graphics card whilst I’m doing the computer shopping thing (there’s a computer fair at UNSW in two weeks but it was pretty meagre last time I went…).

The graphics card thing is mostly just so I’ve got video-out and a DVI connection. I’m sick of my LCD’s picture flickering/distorting because of the cheap VGA cable I’m using! Ah well. Sometime… I can never be bothered buying computer stuff anymore (unless it’s on eBay ;-)).

April 22nd, 10am-1pm. They deserve viral marketing for this one, it’s bizarre enough!

Software piracy also features… but, of course, there seems to be little that can be done to actually report this (if eBay have a “Report violation” link, it’s adequately hidden from me). Observe this question from earlier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, and MS Office for Mac included:

Me: Does this come with original CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe software?
Seller: No.

(Yeah, that was fulltext of the question + answer!)

And on another listing (I didn’t ask the question on this one!) advertised as including iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:

Q: Are you selling the software disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the software, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be sending the laptop and its power cable. Thanks.

Sigh.

(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not convinced I want a Mac laptop anymore. In fact, I’d probably prefer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)