11 Oct 2004
Josh has splurged. It wasn’t entirely an impulse buy, but something close.
I had, of course, planned (and publicly announced) my intent to buy memory sometime this morning… so that part is okay. I failed to clarify just how many different pieces of memory I’d be purchasing. I bought the cheapest possible 512MB stick of DDR-RAM (PC2700) that my favorite stockist had in store, despite it being cheaper next door.
I walked into Computer World, to the desk of someone who was desparately trying to look busy (as they do in that place, in an attempt to avoid actually having contact with customers), and lent across his work area asking “How much is your cheapest 512MB stick of PC2700 RAM?”. He answered, somewhat reluctantly — “$125″ (this is Australian dollars, for any foreigners who think this is ridiculously cheap/expensive: exchange rates are crazy things). I said thankyou, turned, and left the store. Just to clarify for those who haven’t been reading my online ramblings for too long, that store was the bane of my life for a few weeks over warranty issues… I’ll now never buy anything from them, but maintain that they are a useful resource for bargaining leverage at other stores. Like the most excellent THX (or TX, they seem to be having an identity crisis at the minute) across the foyer.
I went next door, and asked the same question… they were, of course, far more helpful, so no leaning-across-desks was required. The price was $139, from memory.
“Over there can do it for $125, how much lower can you get it?”
“Hang on, I’ll check for you.” She looks at the screen for a few seconds. “Sorry, the lowest I can go is $130.”
“That’ll do!” I shout, ever eager to avoid the perils of Computer World after-sales, should something go awry. To me, avoiding those people is worth far more than five dollars, any day of the week.
The inevitable question cropped up, as it always seems to in retail, “Is that all” or “Can I help you with anything else?”. In recent times, I’ve been more and more dissatisfied with my clunky Walkman in which the tape player doesn’t work, and I use exclusively for listening to radio. Not only that, I never did own a portable CD player, so all my music stayed at home, and the radio went with me. Motivation for an MP3 player? You bet.
The MP3 player part of my spending was the “impluse” element… I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but if there were something with a nice feature-set, I’d buy it. My requirements were simply that it be solid-state, compact and DRM-incumbency free… and preferably under $150. With this in mind, I was expecting to get some MP3/USB drive thingo with 128MB of storage, towards the $100 mark. Admittedly, I ended up spending more ($149 — right next to my limit!), but it hits my requirements pretty nicely… not only can I carry my music (and 256MB of it, no less!) with me, I can also get FM radio on this thing. That’s okay, but the “killer feature” on this thing is that it doesn’t need external batteries.
I know, I know: if it’s anything like an iPod’s battery, it’ll bite me in two years. Big deal! I think I’ll have moved on from 256MB in a few years, but that’s a problem for then. Right now, I can have 12 hours of usage between recharges via USB. How cool is that?
I’ve got three gripes with the thing right now:
- The interface is seriously crap.
- From the speed of transfers, I’d guess it’s only USB 1 — no blazingly fast uploads, which is a shame
- Tuning digital radios really gets to me. I need knobs and dials!
Of those three complaints, only the first is significant. I’ve taken to dumping music in the root folder, because it’s easier than screwing in the menu until I figure out how to change folders for playback. Admittedly, I’ve only been using it for a few hours, and I’ll probably get used to it later, but it seems a tad prohibitive. That’s what you get when there’s only a five buttons (“Menu” and playback controls), I suppose.
The worst thing about the design is the positioning of the 3.5mm audio socket. It’s designed so that when a cable (or headphones, whatever) is connected, it’s amazingly difficult to press the menu button in a natural fashion. Whilst human physiology would dictate our fingers press buttons from the side, the positioning of the button is such that you’d need to stick your finger through the audio connector to get to the button comfortably. It doesn’t look so bad, but believe me, it’s irritating.
It also does 20 hours of voice recording (in what format, I have no idea), and yes, it is tiny. I just grabbed a ruler (I don’t think dimensions were listed on the specs sheet, which is generic to the firmware and whole line of models in different form factors), and it’s about 56mm x 38mm x 11mm — about half the size of my phone. What can I say, I like small tech!
This computer is noticeably more snappy with three quarters of a gig of memory… I like it! I’ve got the GIMP sitting editing about 10 moderately large files, with two windows of Firefox filled with tabs, a WISH app, my email client, an RSS reader, and my code editor of choice open, and it’s still zipping along. Sweet.
11 Oct 2004
I would have posted yesterday, but for the fact that I’d been screwing with DNS stuff (foolishly on my www record) yesterday, and it was most unforgiving come time to change it back. Whilst I’d normally see changes fairly quickly, this time around my ISP’s DNS servers (and presumably whatever ISP I’m using as my secondary) were excruciatingly slow to update. So, I haven’t been able to login to my admin panel, hence the lack of posting!
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!
09 Oct 2004
| [Feds target alternative media Web site |
CNET News.com]1 |
US fedral authorities confiscating British servers owned by a US media organisation for an investigation originating outside both these countries. Without any justification or notice given to the server owners.
08 Oct 2004
It’s not really Friday. The gap in posting you see shouldn’t be there, because as far as I’m concerned, it still feels as though it were Thursday. That has to be one of the most compelling reasons not to stay up all night: simply because you don’t adequately recognise the passing of a day, and everything is thrown out completely!
But that, of course, wasn’t motivation enough. I’m now sitting here, having not experienced “sleep” for a tad over 36 hours. Nah, there’s no big important reason for it. Myself and Ben were at Tori’s house last night, and far too much of this time period was spent catching up on un-watched television hours (although, I am glad to say, this was comprised almost entirely of DVD watching, as opposed to real television), but hey, it’s all good. I can still safely say I haven’t watched TV proper in my own house since some time prior to the beginning of this year, so I’m happy.
Eventually the screen bored us stupid, so at about 5:30am we went on an adventure down to a children’s playground, before attacking a cluster of Sulfur Crested Cockatoos, much to their displeasure (although the noise was great!), evidenced in the numerous low-flying escapades which consequently took place above us. Scattering birds look so cool.
Ben had to go to some CSIRO programme at the University of Sydney, which started at 10am. We were all feeling moderately awake, but it was predicted this situation wouldn’t continue for much longer — and, judging by what he’d said previously, Ben was expecting to be doing something tedious and boring like data entry today anyway — making him a prime candidate for falling asleep at the task!
I was supposedly meant to collect my film from a processing centre in the City at 2pm, so I was hanging around a while longer. Tori has the warmest veranda/deck/balcony thing on the face of the planet. I’m now sunburnt, but it was so nice! There were also leaves which looked like people, including one which resembled a knight bearing a lance upon a horse. I maintain that this was not yet another product of our sleep-deprived imaginations! Call it an adaption of that thing where people try and see shapes in clouds — the day was too perfect, there weren’t any clouds to look at!
I eventually left, post-sunburn, and caught a train back down to Town Hall Station, hoping that the developing people were running ahead of time and I could get my 4×6′s, go home, and sleep. I failed on several counts. I “fell asleep” on the train (if the anxious “I don’t normally catch this train, where am I going? can I afford to go to sleep and miss my stop!?” sleep can count), and miraculously managed to wake up JUST as the train was pulling into Town Hall, so that much was good. The print shop still hadn’t done my film, so I drifted (quite literally) off to the City of Sydney library branch at Town Hall. I found this really cool book, which I had to fight to keep myself from falling asleep upon! In the end, I put it back on the shelf, and decided that it was probably best if I keep moving; something reading books isn’t conducive to.
Killed time walking around the city. Went to film shop. Got prints back. Went home!
And then, of course, I was overcome by a “need” to scan the photos, so hey, there goes another while. Meanwhile, in however long I’d been out, the email had amassed to the point where it was unpleasant to have to deal with (although not inherently unpleasant, the sheer volume and time required made it so), and the RSS feeds had progressively grown in “Unread” size. I want to live in a cave.
That said, there were some nice photos out of that batch. I’m feeling quite pleased with myself, truth be told, given that it’s a film SLR camera, and my first roll on it, at that. At any rate, you can judge for yourselves in a few days, as many of them shall likely end up published here, depending on requirements for usage elsewhere.
I think I’m going to go and catch up on some sleep…
06 Oct 2004
I’ve received another bout of email intended for someone else’s eyes today, which is remarkably irritating. More so, as it is evident that these emails come as a result of that person thinking they still have the address which they have abandoned, and I have acquired. That’s what happens when you have in ISP-based address, I guess, but I got it before purchasing this domain, and it’s being retained for the next while, at least until the quantities of spam pouring into it get too ridiculous.
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?