Josh (the blog)

I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.


@joahua

My Australia Day celebrations!

One (1) McOz Burger, Medium Coke and “Australia’s Favorite Fries”, and some random caramel slice that looked nice. And I’m posting this from Dale’s Mac. At 1am the next day. Aussie Aussie Aussie…

Wazee RSS

Wow. Radio.Wazee has a “recently played” RSS feed… I think that’s cool…

*wanders away again*

The New House

A photo or 39 for your entertainment. More to come when we actually move in and things start to look a bit more lived in!

Quickly, thrash someone else’s bandwidth before we move in and I have time to setup my own server and it’d be making MY Internet access grind to a halt! Hehe. Thanks Dale, you’re a legend :)

Neglected to mention…

… that my parents got me a digital camera for the birthday a few days back. It’s a Pentax Optio S40, has a 4MP sensor, 3x optical zoom (and some digital which I’ve of course disabled), a flash, 11MB inbuilt memory (I presume THAT means that there’s 16MB, 5MB of which is software stuff) and another 256MB SD card which we bought.

Every photo posted here from The Lazy Kings til now has been taken with that camera… yeah, I was using it before my birthday, bad me :P

I maintain that the other Pentax (SP 500 film SLR) takes better pictures, especially at night, but it’s just so much more expensive to use all the time! Having said that, I’m not going to let it sink into a cupboard and disappear: It’ll be on hand whenever i’m planning to take (good) photos, whilst the new Pentax will be for general happy snaps and the like.

Qualms with the camera thus far? It didn’t come with a rechargable battery. $90 later, and I’ve got a Samsung charger with killer battery life, so that’s no longer a problem — but it’s an expense that should be noted prior to purchase. Other than that, I haven’t figured out how to manually adjust exposure, so if you’re taking photos at night without a flash (scenic shots, etc.) then it’s not a great idea. Having said that, the massssssssiiiiveee exposure in “Night” mode does do some cool blurry things to photos…

Standing on Coogee's North head, looking WSW towards the main beach and lights. January 19, 2005.

View of the Sydney Harbour Bridge from the Opera House, with lights from NYE 2005 still on display. January 17, 2005, with Tori.

The exposure time (according to the EXIF data) on the Harbour Bridge image is 4 seconds, and 1 second on the first shot (Coogee) — but it felt like lots more, because it was really windy standing on the head. (No, not standing on my head… that would be talent!)

XP Professional on the cheap

This afternoon we got three copies of XP Professional for a ridiculous $85 each (after cashback which hasn’t quite happened yet… so, $125 each — $40 cashback). I love academic pricing. The computer I write this on is getting it installed probably some time tomorrow, a new system (well, new to me, recently acquired — it’s a Pentium 3) gets it sometime in the next week, and another Pentium 3 system will have it installed after we move in properly and I put a new 80GB hard drive in it (one of three which is coming in sometime this week, probably Tuesday-ish).

Exciting times!