Vanilla Access Point

They don’t exist. Well, not for under $350. Why is it so hard to come by a decent, normal, boring access point? I don’t want a router with four ports and a pathetic access point attached, I want a decent 802.11b/g/lmnop access point, preferably with dual antennas but not neccessarily, with a readily available wall-mount kit, and a single bridge ethernet port would be a bonus. Various encryption stuffs are welcome but not required. Max price $150, ideally sub-$100 for something with one antenna and no wall-mount kit (I’d build one anyway I think), which is reasonable because you can get wireless ADSL routers now for that much. Yes, give me less functionality and convergence and more usefulness/appropriateness to purpose.

UoW nightmare

I actually had the worst dream I’ve had in a long time last night. For whatever reason, it was suddenly decided that I was going to start attending UoW (not a bad thing in itself!) and, accordingly, move into a college down there (nevermind that I’d heard at least one of the colleges down there went bankrupt and didn’t even know how many others there were). I think it was something to do with a decision parentals had made, though I don’t know exactly what it could have been — I’m fairly autonomous, so they’d hardly be choosing a uni for me, and considering rent cost in Woollongong (1 bedroom flat for between $130-$150 a week) living out of a college would probably be cheaper and more likely what I’d go for, for various reasons. I remembered thinking it would be okay if I owned a car, but then thinking that I can’t really afford a car. Then, after that, realising that employment/prospects for employment are inextricably bound up in Sydney for me, knowing no-one in Woollongong (not even on mailing lists!) and not feeling terribly inclined to start working in a ‘normal’ uni-student job. Add to that the fact that I’d have to start working more (again) in order to support cost of living, etc., and the whole situation starts to suck quite a bit in terms of study. The not-having-a-car/uncertainty-about-public-transport thing gets worse when one starts looking for a good church within walking/bike distance.

Anyway I don’t think I’ve ever been so stressed in a dream before. (Stressed is different to scared, note!) I’m presently trying to figure out exactly why it was dreamt at all. Something to do with relative uni proximity/ease of pretty-much-everything in my present circumstances, perhaps.

Spectrum staircase

Opera is an evil

baby-eating email-eating monster that erratically crashes.

I’m not even running a Beta! I have not-many theories about why it’s suddenly become so unstable, but Gmail seems to bring out the worst gremlins. No matter, I need to upgrade to 9.01 soon in the hope it’ll improve matters (currently 8.54).

MacPro

It’s kinda nice and all, but seriously, so expensive. I’m sure the parts are all really high quality, but that I can source pretty much all upgrade options offered for half the price or less — for example, adding a meagre two 512MB sticks costs an obscene $AU499, whilst even the most ridiculous gamer-marketed RAM (you know the stuff, it’s supposedly ‘tuned’ in pairs, etc.) can be had for $135 for two 512MB sticks (OCZ brand) — is rather telling about their horrific markup.

And yeah, I’m sure it’s all great quality and magically never crashes and all the rest of that marketing crap. Good for you guys. I’m gonna wander back over the other side of the room here and install Windows on my equally-powerful system for, oh, about 40% of the cost. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of your monitors. I can pick up an equivalent Dell 30″ for $600 less than your offering… and if I’m content with a meagre 23″ then I can get a 24″ Dell for $400 less! Even the 20″ screens are $500 apart. Seriously, it’s completely unjustifiable and no-one in their right mind should be prepared to spend that much more for a brand.

Sigh.

I need to open a buy-a-new-computer account and start putting money into it. Well not really… I just need a new harddrive and various software licenses I guess. I think I’d miss Ubuntu too much (maybe)… I don’t even know why, nearly everything I can do here I can do in Windows (haha – does anyone else notice the beautiful inversion of that argument? I actually think I’ve been running Linux for too many years now to have posted about it in any currently-stored online blog entries! Crazy) except anything requiring a terminal. That’s almost definitely my greatest frustration, but no matter. I need software that doesn’t run in Linux and is too intensive to work well in virtualized conditions. Best option for me would be to get a whole separate computer, but then… well, this thing can feel flaky after being on for two weeks. Windows I’d probably get that every two days or so, but at least I’d think to reboot. Here, I just kill processes and at worst logout. Kernel patches are the only thing taking this down, basically.

Moral of the story… something like don’t waste your money on a shiny new Mac.