Accordingly, the improved bandwidth situation at the present prohibitively expensive costs of ~$600/month for a good link is ultimately a bit irrelevant if mobile tech delivers last-mile infrastructure and the mobile web enables e-commerce, social media participation, governance, healthcare and more. This isn’t a case for existing ISPs to drop prices: they’ve definitely got a very good business case for leaving prices up but using the link to improve value while this is still a valuable commodity. The only significant short-term challenge to this comes, potentially, in the form of any government policy implemented. They might do well to intervene here and stimulate economic development by promoting global connectivity… but I suspect the interests of established business and government, if they resemble anything like those in Australia, coincide too significantly for such bold maneuvers to ever come to fruition!

From a business standpoint, it makes sense to capture these markets with medium bandwidth technologies early. That said, the relatively limited capacity of this additional global link makes co-location essential for any serious engagement. What this represents is an important in-road for low-outlay development of new markets with significant parallels to existing products (i.e. to English-speaking populations without need for additional infrastructure).

For East Africans, however, this is much bigger. Internet connectivity enables exports of innovative solutions, and, as social media uptake improves, of localised (l10n)/internationalised (i18n) solutions in response to this newly-visible Internet market segment. The problem of ghettoisation along language lines is not so prominent perhaps as a result of significant Anglophone influence — Francophone Africa will, of course, engage in different networks because of language barriers. Yet some services, Twitter perhaps eminent among them, have irrationally succeeded independently of ‘native’ language (it remains at present offered only in English and Japanese, despite significant Chinese membership, and, who can forget, Iranian political application!) — while others (Facebook, to pick a similar example) have languished and been replaced by clones despite their linguistic plurality (26 unique languages last I recall hearing a count, including English (Pirate) and many more serious ones) — Xiaonei being but one example of this.

If language is not an issue, it is possible other disparities will become divisive in the same way. Developmental barriers in terms of software industry (a key driver of domestic web innovation) and global trading partners will steer usage in any number of particular directions. For example, China’s inept attempts at achieving independence from Microsoft software in the last decade have been effectively squashed by their rampant piracy situation. Parts of eastern Africa engage in literal acts of piracy, but it’s probably not indicative of an attitude towards or developed industry against protection of intellectual property. If the criminal distribution network doesn’t yet exist, and software adoption is insufficiently mature, it’s entirely possible that open source could win. This is naive, and based on the presumption that Africa has, to date, existed in a vacuum — but if we consider for a moment a day working on a computer without Internet connectivity, something of the radical difference between minimal connectivity and full-on broadband enabled connectivity begins to sink in.

One Australian commentator recently observed, in response to a dramatic increase in average per-capita bandwidth consumption/annum, that there are a number of “tipping points” in Internet usage. For example, in the last 18 months, availability of online services as well as wider adoption of home broadband has resulted in a massive expansion of data transfers despite only a marginal increase in average connection speed. Youtube and its ilk have entered a perfect storm of gradually expanding connectivity: it just so happens that at certain points, connectivity results in usage peaks (which then plateau but don’t decline) as consumers discover new ways of using the Internet to interact. This happens with the transition from dialup to always-on Internet, and it happens again at certain speed points–consider tabbed browsing as well as video on demand/what we now consider “bandwidth intensive” activities.

This could be a tipping point for economic development and global integration. Watch closely!

Michael’s pulling the plug on the server that this website has run on since 2003.

The ‘server’ has changed dramatically in constitution since it all began way back when, but… wow. An astonishingly large part of my teenage years. For the longest time, it seemed as though the Internet had altogether ceased to exist everytime Dale’s connection went out. In the early days, we were all running servers on port 1200 to circumvent ISP restrictions on port 80. phpBB was the order of the day, running Apache — on a pirated copy of Windows 2000 (those were the days in which “legitmate software” constituted an oxymoron). Operating on an early ADSL link with 64kbps upload, forum emoticons were hosted on free web space provided by iiNet in order to conserve bandwidth. You laugh now, but the speed boost was incredible. Every time iiNet dropped out (to future readers: that’s what happens when the internet goes out for a couple of hours, none of this occasional connection time-out rubbish), an irate explanatory post from mwdmeyer would emerge and life would continue as normal. Until parents discovered the server running and turned it off again, which would spark an effort to conceal yet another computer in a room crowded full of equipment. About halfway through 2004, they gave up searching.

These were the days (for me) of NE2000 clones powering Smoothwall/m0n0wall routers, recycling hardware, a subscription to Atomic before all the other kids (I bought more geeky magazines than anyone I know–I think it was that strange meeting place of compters, creativity, and cant that I later became comfortable with), when GeForce 2’s and Pentium 4’s (the first ones with RDRAM that everyone despised) and DDR-supporting Athlons were still zippy. When frame-based redirects passed for domain names — .tk, anyone?

Mostly, it was about the forums… but as for personal publishing, this was no small resource. My first dynamic website was a blog hosted on that server — I don’t think it yet had a name — we all rolled our own web software in those days (it’s not that long ago). Some of us still do. The first domain name acquired was Dale’s, in March 2004, co-inciding (more or less) with the forums’ first birthday. Twelve US dollars later (Joker.com’s prices still haven’t changed), we were all still using frame-based redirects — static IPs were the stuff of pipe-dreams, and Dynamic DNS, though around, was outside of the experience of most of us. Steve ran a notoriously-flaky IIS server with real domains and Exchange, but paid about $150 a month for the privilege: static IPs being available only on business grade internet connections.

These are mere details. The forums themselves constitute an amazing chronicle of the lives of mwdmeyer, ucosty, Sammy, i_am_a_n00bie, Smile:), smKz, n|cktangents, angelicdeity, baibai, Sphinx^, ludvikas, and a handful of others over a fairly tumultuous time. There is so much not recorded explicitly that surrounds the nearly 16,000 messages from these eleven users alone. Some has been suppressed, other parts forgotten, but all of it inextricably linked together in the momentum of time. There are some things about that time which will never be shared with those who weren’t around.

The forums didn’t survive post-school. This shouldn’t be surprising, given the amount of research that says this will be the case for any given relationships faced with that manner of transition, but it was still bizarre witnessing what would have been several months of time spent on a single website evaporate into (not much). The server moved from Balmain to Marian Street, eventually finding its way into a rack there. This is where things get hazy for me. I think the last time I saw Michael might’ve been New Years’ Eve 2005/2006… I feel some sense of guilt about that, but recognise mutual busy-ness had a role such that neither of us should be blamed alone. I don’t believe that a blameless “but things changed” is ever sufficient when talking about close relationships. I’m fairly certain my closest friend for about two years at school is someone that I no longer have anything to do with, but can’t explain why. And I know that I can’t in any way blame him, because I’m so guilty of failing to keep working on relationships myself.

I suppose the point of all this is that the computer formally known as ‘Metro’, now ‘Loki’ (I don’t know how it got that name — Loki to me is an amazing contributor to Linux-based gaming, 2000–2002 RIP, but it could just as easily have been named after the Norse trickster and Odin’s wily accomplice!) isn’t just the latest in a series of bits of electronic gear that some markup and pixels have been piped off for a couple of years. This is just one step closer to a complete closure of a very large chapter of my life… and, yeah, that’s incredibly sad.

Please don’t for a minute consider this to be my arguing that Loki should stay switched on — it’s about something far greater and more personal than a startlingly reliable FreeBSD web server that just happened to host a website for free for a long time.

There aren’t too many people you can make sit in the back of a car on their 18th birthday, much less who will laugh along with as it happens.

This isn’t an obituary, just a poor expression of remorse at the (human) disconnection and ‘drifted’ relationships of that era. Michael, once all this stupid uni crap gets out of the way (maybe after you move again?), I owe you a fairly large drink.

Thankyou.

Yet, increasingly, our surfing habits are defined by this bizarre social concept that seems to be shaping certainly acquisitions and web-two-point-oh-bubblism, wherein websites serve users by connecting them with one another, not on the basis of them knowing what they wanted, but rather in a bizarre a priori manner whereby degrees-of-separation (MySpace) or user-supplied-already-knowns (LiveJournal, Xanga, etc.) define connectedness and displayed content.

Search is no longer the macro-inter killer app, but an intra-site facility applied to microcosm — often based on “transparent” technology that has, on the basis of known knowns (in the words of a certain Rumsfeld), already done some of the hard work for users (I should say people, but don’t out of habit: it is an industry hazard) without actually asking them anything. This is where location– and organisation-based matching (cf. MySpace, Facebook, etc.) come in.

But none of this data is intelligently searchable by generic engines.

None of this data (in the case of Myspace especially, horribly marked-up doing-everything-wrong-with-the-web technically entity that it is) is available for indexing by search engines because it’s not abiding by any defined semantics. There is not, for example, any overwhelming use of microformats — hCard, etc. — for defining contact details in any common sense. Yet these things are searchable within a given website.

And, what’s more, these things are searchable with great precision within (social networking) sites. This is because of a very well defined internal semantic (not the “semantic web”, but internal data structures) and an enforced obedience to these structures that was never a part of pre-SocNet sites.

SocNet platforms are radically different from web 1.0 systems in that they are (ironically) vastly more constricting. As “web 1.0″ I would cite Geocities and free web hosting services, portals, and all-things-to-all-people content networks. Now, we’ve got blogs (precisely defined websites), MySpace (chiefly SocNet profiles with bits on the fringes common to the users, and now with enough impetus to appear unstoppable), Flickr (free — and fee-for-service that people actually pay for — web hosting, precisely defined as photo hosting), and, strangely, a portal (Yahoo!) still on top of Alexa 500 rankings. A portal that owns both Flickr and Geocities, but has changed the model of the latter to place greater emphasis on fee-for-service hosting. But I digress into strategy — the point is not that, but rather in the way social data is stored.

Flickr is meta-data rich. It uses a well defined system based on EXIF, intrinsic semantics (title, description, tags — tags that get used properly, unlike Facebook which doesn’t bother to make such things clear — I want Facebook to flop, by the way, because it annoys me, so don’t expect nice things to be said about it. It’s a poor closed-system imitator, albeit with a stupidly effective advertising model everyone else should be wishing they came up with first but haven’t seen in order to copy… because it’s a closed system (or used to be) exclusive in scope. Which makes it very effective SocNet/Web 2.0, by my own definition, so I don’t really have a basis for complaint.) and extrinsic semantics (groups, pools, etc.).

Profiles, unlike ‘pure’ SocNet (Myspace, Facebook), permit anonymity, but allow disclosure of as much as is desired: at any rate, that is not the purpose of the site. Myspace/Facebook’s raison d’etre is profiles. (Well, and that and cash-cow-marketing-tool of the *R**IA’s of the world) Accordingly, its profiles have very definite semantics even whilst the rest of the site may not (I speak of Myspace more, here). Myspace gives core “Details” profile info individual fields, whilst allowing a diverse “Interests & Personality” information in freeform textareas that are designed to entice users into participation (and, possibly, aiding more fuzzy searches — but mostly I think it’s just compelling content, as there is no immediately obvious way to search that data).

“Interests & Personality”, along with blog content, seems to be the only freeform contributed material available on the site. Want music or a video with your profile? You’ve got to browse to the band’s site, load the player (no go in Opera with Flash at the minute, it seems), and then select “Add” on the track. They (yeah, it’s kinda big-brotherish) know exactly what song you chose, what band it’s from, what genre, etc. — that is to say, unambiguously and certainly beyond a probably-common song title. This isn’t an upload-yourself-and-we’ll-manage-rights kind of thing. The officiality gives that internal data structure that much more depth: but, again, the point is that the data is internal and not open.

This, it seems, is the defining quality of SocNet. That’s what makes the ideas of open federation advocated by Google Talk earlier this year so bizarre for the rest of us. We don’t particularly care, because closed systems mean innovation (because we can define new data for ourselves to work with) and/or extensibility that isn’t possible in an open platform (if, for example, not all federated partners agree to a spec extension — take, for example, Google Talk’s own Jabber base and proprietary VoIP on top of that). Openness is in Google’s interests, because it’s so dependent on things being open for its core business (search). But real people want services that work, not services that push them to another site. I’ve never trusted sites that bounce me off to Google for their site’s search, even if it’s one of those crappy co-branded things. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you make someone inspect your website from an inferior perspective when all the information is stored in a database, with the possibility of more semantically meaningful search open internally only?

Google won’t deal with your internal search needs. It’s not designed to. It does a great job of dealing with publicly indexed materials completely aside from SocNet services. SocNet sites thrive on and are empowered by strong intrinsic semantics that make clever profile-based (or UGC–based) search possible, which builds loyalty etcetera in a way foreign to informational websites. SocNet is experiential and (surprise surprise) social — it doesn’t have to be about anything.

Content was deposed as king sometime in the middle of the first decade of the twenty first century, and with that regime change his deputy, Search, was also shuffled to a somewhat less prominent position. Somewhere out of sight, Search’s identical twin, Query, is the real power behind the throne: it uses unindexed data and makes clever links to bring people closer together in a way that traditional search engines had never even envisaged.

Orange today informed us that they’ve become 3. High-powered marketing blitz to existing customers of Orange has begun, and is expected to continue in force. This line typifies the level of crap I’ve come to expect 3 (and most other 3G telephony — not data, that’s okay — networks) to spew:

So, on our 3G network, you can enjoy the same great value, plus international roaming, Bluetooth™, picture messaging and more.

Okay. Let’s analyse this a bit. My call rates are going up, even though the volume of users on Hutchinson’s 3G network “is now larger than our CDMA network” (cost/volume should go down, but hasn’t). I could get international roaming with Orange, albeit only in places with CDMA: no-one should ever choose CDMA without being aware at least to some degree how the technology works/is applied globally (if that’s something they care about — I don’t, global roaming is still way too expensive + I don’t go overseas often enough). Bluetooth is the pinnacle of crap in this line, having absolutely nothing to do with the network — unless it’s a provider-supplied phone with Bluetooth disabled because they’re scumbags. I don’t need to elaborate on this point, suffice to say I sincerely hope no-one with any technical knowledge copy-proofed this. Picture messaging is arguably the most useless thing that ever happened to telephony.

As for the other crap HT have spun, I especially love this line from their FAQ:

What happens to my Orange contract?

Your Orange contract will remain valid, however, as a special offer we are allowing a full waiver of all remaining handset instalments when you upgrade to 3G.

Marvellous. Not only am I being forced onto more expensive plans + call rates (call rates matter for where I’d like to take my mobile phone usage patterns — at present, I’m price-conscious to the point of making less calls than I otherwise would, and SMS usage is trivial at 11c to any mobile in Australia. With 3 I get some free SMS, but I’m not at all helped on the call rate front), there’s also absolutely no exit option.

Effectively, HT would love to change my contract so I’m on a volume-economics-powered 3G network on which they have higher margins and I see no real benefits. Get this:

Can I keep my current phone when I upgrade to 3G?

Yes. The phone is yours to keep, however we will not be connecting any new services to Orange and this phone will not work on any other network, including our 3G network. We have developed fantastic upgrade offers that include a free handset within the plan. We are in the process of setting up a recycling program to take all old mobiles.

The phone is mine to keep, but there aren’t any CDMA networks left in Australia (WCDMA is actually nothing to do with CDMA and has no interoperability with it). “Fantastic upgrade offers” refer to marginally reduced SMS costs (which, so far as I can gather, is the most profitable part of non-business-account telephony services in Australia: namely, Orange’s core market. They never made a big impact on the business telco scene, and their flagship product — before they ditched it — was a landline-replacement plan) and increased call costs if I were to choose a plan based on my current usage. “Include a free handset” refers to the ability to get a free phone if I agree to be shunted onto a new contract term. Not terribly likely. In fact, I’m going to see this contract term out, then switch to another telco.

Or maybe not, but I’d certainly like to. Anyone have recommendations for a $35–40 plan, preferably with cap? Yes, even Telstra is an option if the cap is good enough. It’d mean we could get rid of our landline, still have a discount on Internet (two or more Telstra services on one bill), and switch to VoIP. Sure, Telstra are still getting our money but they’re shooting themselves in the foot doing it! I just want the family to get past the “learning curve” of VoIP so they’re hooked on the idea and then we can find a more compelling ISP, pick the cheapest possible landline rate with a non-Telstra provider, and then they’re only getting ULL money from us.

Did I ever mention I hate telcos?

Note their wonderfully original Flash banner. Look closer. Right click on the movie and hit “Rewind”. What you thought you could see before but didn’t really want to believe anyone could be stupid enough to do has come true. For those who can’t be bothered going to their website and/or don’t have Flash installed, observe my screenshot above. Beneath their logo there is indeed text that reads “Company Name.net”.

Charming. But not quite so charming as this little gem from Driver Web Designers: “We offer our customers the services of a professional inhouse Graphic designer to give your Website the edge over the competition.”

Ummm.

Better than all that still, of course, is the fact that their brand name as proudly displayed not only on their own banner, but also on the Driver Web Designers website, points not to their own website (which is switch.com.au) but rather that of Union Switch & Signal.

Yeah, I used rel="nofollow" on some links in this post to prevent Google from counting them in its index. It’s because some stupidity doesn’t bear following.

Anyway, BloGTK is a desktop client for WordPress which runs on Linux systems. Niggly features I’ve discovered in the last 30 seconds:

• Can’t select text, then click the “hyperlink” icon, and have the anchor tags wrap around selected text — they appear to the right of it.
• Compulsory “target” field in anchor generation — which I don’t think (if I recall correctly) is even valid in XHTML 1.1, possibly earlier.
• Lack of built-in quick tags that WordPress’ own posting interface has, namely for unordered lists, list items, and tagging of abbreviations, etc.
• Ironically, it’s possible to define your own tags, which can wrap around selected text just fine, whilst the “built-in” anchor button doesn’t do this… Hmm, okay.

It’s really little things, nothing major — the formatting tags (strong, em, etc.) work just fine on selections, which is great. It also has an inbuilt preview which (I’m 99% sure) functions using an internal rendering engine (or part of the GTK toolkit, same thing), rather than making HTTP calls. A change that’d be interesting to see (although one which doesn’t affect me directly) would be the implementation of either a WYSIWYG editor, or simply Textile or Markdown support with XMLHttpRequest being used (or something like it? I gather that’s a JavaScript thing, not having ever used it, so it mayn’t be usable like that.

Another thing that’d be nice is the implementation of keyboard shortcuts, just for text formatting stuff — so, Ctrl + B for strong and em tags, etc. And also the changing of the category display to a list of checkboxes in its own frame (or whatever the term is in desktop app interface design lingo) on the right of the posting area, instead of a dropdown — that’d allow posters to select multiple categories, more rapidly.

It’s a good simple app (sorry… I know it’s probably rather unsimple when you look at the code driving behind it, but I don’t understand any of that Python stuff, so I’m just judging on the interface), but a few niggly things mean I’d still prefer to use the native WordPress web interface.

Edit: In part to see if it does, but also because I had another thought — the absence of a “Posting…” status window is also something which could be improved, just so the user doesn’t think the application has crashed. It took a while here due to my ISP’s poor DNS performance, and had I not known why it was going slowly, I may have closed the application thinking it had crashed.

12 Magill Street
RANDWICK 2031
NSW, Australia

The fixed telephone number has also changed; if you need it, send me an email or text (SMS) me (mobile number is posted on contact page), and I’ll give it to you. Yeah, I actually would rather the whole world didn’t know that one, really.

My josh@ii.net address is no longer used, finally. Yes, I did just post a mailto link. Hopefully anyone else who trys to use it in the future will initially login, get too much spam in the first hour, and decide that was a stupid, stupid idea and go for a more obscure address. And just for the record, most of the spam was attained by previous owners (and other people who were utterly convinced that it was their email address, despite it being mine and mine alone for probably over a year. Yes, Josh Marks of South Australia, I’m looking at you.), not me, so don’t go accusing me of being irresponsible with the email address to the extent that it became widely circulated! As it is, I was probably asking for it by having a commonname@isp.tld address, but still, irresponsible usage certainly played a part in the spam received.

To contact me electronically, use the contact form and I’ll email you back (and you can reply to that address), or simply send email to whatever address you would like to use at this domain — that is to say, a catch-all. I know that was worded terribly obscurely, but I’m paranoid about such things — if you need to send me an email, the contact form does just that.

I’ve just looked at their website for cable plans… their Unlimited* 10GB shaped plan looks excellent for my usage! Not only would there be sufficiently insane speed, but it also seems as though the capping/shaping is rather soft — not that this really impacts me, seeing I normally managed perhaps 6GB a month with iiNet! Having said that, uploads would be counted with BigPond, which is a little sucky, but bearable (especially seeing people report being able to download 30GB+ sans capping).

The only other thing that’d be lame about Telstra, AFAIK, is the blocking of port 25 (not a huuuge problem, but I’ve got used to running a local sendmail daemon to deal with outbound stuff) and possibly support, if contact with them is ever required. The service quality here since Thursday has been perfect, but Tori (also a BigPond Cable user) has constant dropouts — uncertain if that’s her wireless or the actual ‘net link, though.

I looked around for details about port 80 being blocked, but it seems that’s something which I just imagined… fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the case! Which, so I think, is a good thing. Well, certainly a useful collaborative thing, as it’s easier to seek feedback whilst editing a site live locally, rather than waiting the hundredth of a second for it to upload elsewhere (yes, I’m being perfectly serious; I would choose an ISP based on that).

Anyone have any horror stories with BigPond that they wish to share? Preferably someone who has actually USED BigPond before in their life, as everyone seems to be very opinionated, simply because it’s Telstra. Oh, and telling me they don’t peer with PIPE Networks doesn’t count, because I’d already stopped using PIPE content in an attempt to make some kind of dent in my iiNet download quota. Needless to say, I failed.

Hmm. Aside from that, of course, other things have been happening. Yesterday was my brother’s 8th birthday — I would say happy birthday, but he doesn’t read this, so there we go. :P We went out to Juanita’s, a great Mexican restaruant in Kensington, and… umm… ate food. As you do.

The rest yesterday was spent on a variety of things, from frantically editing CSS and the occasional graphic (all visual design work, thankfully — I’ve decided that I shouldn’t make a habit of programming, as it’s something I regularly fall flat on my face trying!) for an upcoming website, to reading Henrik Ibsen’s 1877 play, A Doll’s House.

I’m struggling to decide which was more enjoyable, too… this website features some rather well implemented gimmicky elements of design, and it’s immensely satisfying to watch come together, from paper mockup to digital reality (haha, I’d never noticed the irony in that before — funny how us web people turn even the concept of “reality” itself on its head, hey?). At the same time, A Doll’s House was an excellent play. I think a comparison of which is more “enjoyable” is truistic, because the play is certainly not enjoyable, even if it was incredibly worthwhile reading.

The website is currently chock-full of proprietry –moz CSS extensions, which is part of a new strategy I’m trying to cut development time. Basically, the thought behind it goes “Josh sucks when working with the GIMP”, so the idea is I use Mozilla controls to achieve visually what I want in an electronic form, such that what I wish to achieve is evident on screen already, and then simply go about converting that to a static graphical form. Of particular use, at least for what I’d envisaged for this design, is the Opacity property… it’s not a perfect representation of what I’ll end up with, as it effects the contents of the element it’s applied to (i.e. not JUST the background of an element), but it’s close enough for all intents and purposes.

Further into this website, I’ll post estimates as to just how much time this has saved… it’s something of an intangible, but hey, you get that.

Today’s the last day of my holidays! Ahhhhh! This has honestly been one of the shorter holiday periods of my life… ah well. I think I’m going to go and buy some more film and RAM for this computer today… I’m sick of seeing it 30% into swap, and physical usage sitting at 98%!

P.S. Mandy Moore’s song “Only Hope” is suprisingly good — I’d written her off as another pop queen, but I’d cite that song as proof she can sing!

The signal-noise ratio for my email is getting much better than it used to be — In the last twenty-four hours, I had an 18:158 spam-to-real email ratio, which is pretty damn good (about 11.5% is spam). A few months back, I’d be getting well above 40 spam messages a day. The best thing I’ve ever done for reducing spam is disabling the automatic display of external images in email messages. It takes about four clicks to view images, if that is something I wish to do (at the minute, Macromedia is pretty much the only place I get email from that sends external linked messages, aside from Sato, who try to use FRAMES in their messages, instead. I continue to roll my eyes in disgust.), and besides, images that are attachments still display fine.

What’s the purpose of this? Well, if an image URI string has an identifier in it, then spam campaigns can track which messages are being received and/or opened — and send MORE spam to that address. If I’m not loading the images, then their server isn’t getting a request from me, and they don’t know that the message was received, and, in theory at least, give up.

The numbers would suggest that this is working. Except it doesn’t do much to cull the stupidity of some people. Like my car-loving friend with whom I have never spoken, Mr. Josh Marks of 5 Crespin Place Roxburgh Park, Victoria. The poor man has been trying to purchase a car for some time now, and keeps giving the wrong email address on the form. They contact the email address with details about the brochures he has ordered, but the owner of the address, yours truly, couldn’t care less.

There is a phone number on the form he submitted (the details of the form are inline at the bottom of the reply, which is how I know all this… no friends in the ASIO, sorry to disappoint), which, so it turns out, is as incorrect as the email address. It’s a wonder he didn’t get the mailing address wrong.

I called the number that was listed on the form, (03) 9308 —0, given as his “Business” number, and it was answered by a girl who sounded as though she were about 7 years old, who (quite politely) informed me that I probably had the wrong number. Arrggghh!!!! I called interstate and didn’t even get to rant at the right guy!! How much does that suck?

Anyway. A quick lookup on Australia’s phone directory, White Pages residential listing revealed his home number to be (03) 9308 7989 — the last character of which is immediately next to the “zero”. I’m still wondering how he managed to get the email address wrong, though.

Not only that, the same incorrect phone number was also given on two completely separate forms! I have, sitting in my inbox, emails from Suburu, Holden Australia, Honda and Mercedes Benz (DaimlerChrysler being the originating domain) and possibly others. On all of these forms, the same mistakes are reproduced, without fault! It’s a miracle this person goes home to the right house (5 Crespin Pl, Roxburgh Park)… this is unconfirmed, of course.

What makes it even more ridiculous, is the fact that this guy is apparently still at school. You think I’m breaking all the rules in posting this guys phone number, full name, and home address on my website? I’ll go one step further, and publish email messages not intended for me. I have no qualms with doing this, as the emails were evidently intended for myself — they are repeatedly sent, containing the same content, and bear no message requesting that the emails be kept confidential or returned to sender if they reach the wrong recipient. I’m more than covered — I have tried, on several occasions now, to send email to the addresses from which this email has come, and it has bounced from their servers. No alternate contact method was given, and I have taken all reasonable steps to try and resolve the situation (including making interstate phone calls at cost to myself — albeit to the wrong number, but I’ll be giving the home number a buzz sometime soon). Muwahahahaha.

Hi, My Name Is Josh and at school i am doing a project on
two of holden’s vehicles, The New Commodore SV6, and the VZ Monaro, could
you please send me some information on these cars

Oooh, it’s the fully sick Monaro, bro. You’re doing a project, so you send messages to every car manufacturer on the face of the planet with the wrong return details. Did you fail the project?

I spent last night @ the Cat’s residence (a.k.a. the Cat-man) watching a movie called “The Whole Nine Yards”.  Hehe, I watched TV!  Wow!

Also been spending time burning up the bandwidth as much as possible streaming stuff, especially off TheBasement.  Any particular reason?  Nope.  I’ve decided that, just like the rest of iiNet apparently sees a need to, I must download as much as possible just beacuse I’m allocated ridiculous amounts of quota by my… generous ISP.  Who, just for the record, currently have a distinct lack of functioning international links, whilst WestNet, Pacific, Telstra (who is being blamed for the outage) and miscellaneous other ISP’s are functioning perfectly (how do I know this?  Hmm.  I’m listening to streaming music live from the US via a Pacific relay, surfing the internet using a Telstra proxy, resolving hosts using a TPG DNS server (iiNets went out, again), and Whirlpool reports WestNet as working fine.)

To be fair, iiNet have been decent for the last month or three, but still… UNCOOL.