Capped, part II

I’ve been browsing with images disabled for a while now. It’s great fun until Flash comes along. I appreciate well built (separated presentation/content) and accessible websites more now than at any other time.

Capped =(

I think we lasted 14 months. Now it’s time to switch to ADSL 2+, definitely… unless Bigpond re-quota their plans in the near future. This is just one of those things that comes with changing usage patterns. We’re still pretty average users in terms of overall bandwidth consumption (well, “pretty average” based on Whingepool w0w-0mg-my-1$p-iz-so-st1ngy-w1t-bndwdth!!Lo!L!11! users being not normal, and a presumption of “normality” for broadband being in line with Telstra’s products in Australia), but things change. I’ll stream video on the web without thinking twice now: that wouldn’t have happened anywhere near as much 18 months ago. I’m getting used to a crappy media experience in a 3″ box on my 17″ LCD, heh. Having said that, I’m about to go downstairs and watch an ~8″ video I downloaded, on a 42″ screen… and it’ll look fine! (Stupid widescreen lame-resolution/dual-link DVI-not-supported piece of junk that it is).

I’ve got a server running permanently here now, and Bigpond uploads count. That wouldn’t have mattered in the past, but I’ve pushed between 1 and 2GB of traffic from it in the last month… so it’s a contributing factor to the problem of being 800MB over quota at present.

Exetel are looking good to me at the minute (and their Vodafone-resold mobile plans look pretty awesome, too… a part of that is that they’re presented sensibly in a table, rather than spread across millions of pages with promotional crap — as per every large telephony provider in Australia).

Last banana on campus?

I went hunting for a banana smoothie at uni today, knowing that they’d soon be unavailable (and/or ridiculously expensive) for a fairly long time in Australia (as a result of cyclones that wiped out 95% of our production and biosecurity restrictions on imports). First stop was… the place behind the dividery wall thingos downstairs at Manning, with no luck… they were all out of bananas at 10:30am! I tried BB’s over at Wentworth a couple of hours later and managed to get one from there. BB’s smoothies rock. Haven’t tried hot drinks from there yet, coz it’s too far away and the only time I feel like hot drinks is when I’m near the cart outside Fisher… but I had a bad experience with a mocha there so… yeah. Mind you, I think the person who made it wasn’t the usual guy. I’ve had better since, but am still a bit wary.

Anyway. Last banana(s). I saw one of them that went in and it looked really good… what a shame! (Yes… natural disasters have ramifications other than bananas, and that’s bad too… we’ll take that as implicit!) So yes, that was a good drink. If you want banana smoothies or muffins or whatever else banana-related go hunt them down sooner rather than later… prices/KG have already gone up by lots in shops, so it’s only going to be a matter of time before cafes and the like either stop selling them or make products with them in really expensive.

And I don’t have a “food” category to post this in. Ah well!

Mutual friends

I know I’m posting about this a fair bit lately. It’s important at the minute, I’ll stop when things settle down a bit. I’m really happy I haven’t allowed this to be/turn into an all-geek blog.

Anyway, aren’t meeting friend’s friends great? Especially when both parties have been mentioned to one another by the mutual friend, and you’re expecting to see someone you don’t-know-but-know-by-proxy at a certain place (here, a lecture/tut). It’s good because it alleviates the usual screening process people unconsciously (or consciously, I guess) do when in new groups of people, and there’s a pre-existing (implicit) degree of trust, to some extent. First steps taken care of.

Drawbacks? Well, I suppose there could be when you cease to be friends contained in one context and start to be friends outside of that initial context socially, etc., and there’s overlap with the original mutual friend… but even that depends on the nature of the relationship(s) so much that it doesn’t make sense to assert there’s anything universally bad with such relationships.

Interesting stuff to think about. Next time you’re meeting a friend’s friend in a context external to the original friend, see if you run all the usual “filters” on them as you would on anyone else unknown in the room. It’s different to sharing an interest, in that the common friend isn’t just a conversation catalyst (as an object, not as someone physically there starting the conversation for you) but rather a vehicle for trust. Thoughts?

ESM Weekend Away 2006

This weekend just past was spent away at Springwood (lower Blue Mountains, just outside of Sydney’s boundaries) with a whole bunch of people from church, looking at a series of dinners called Introducing God that we’re going to be running later this year. I was a bit cynical about the scope of it and how practical talks on evangelism related to what the Bible has to say, but interesting conversations were had resultingly, so it’s all good!

The best part of the weekend would just be hanging out with people and taking lots of photos of insano trampoline stuff (which looked cool in real life but looks even cooler when in still frames!). The best concept from the actual talks, so far as I was concerned, was the idea that as we’re (i.e. Christians) brought into God’s family by Jesus, we should be a part of the “family business” — which, essentially, equates to evangelism. It’s a pretty good way of linking together our connection to God and why evangelism is an essential part of that relationship.

Anyway, I took lots of photos as well. And am presently trying out Flickr on a larger scale (i.e. I uploaded the weekend’s photos to Flickr to try it out, and there’s nearly 120 photos in the set).