Here comes wireless

Hello again dear reader.

I had to get a laptop for work. That's a long story in itself and one I won't go into here.

Anyway... I've got one. I use it at work, but I have dial up through Alphalink. It's pretty good, but slow. If I was to wait around for this stuff to load up, I'd be older than I am now.

So I decided to get into wireless broadband. My partner is studying for her Master of Arts (I've already got one of those), and she is often on the one phone line we have. The solution was for me to get wireless broadband. So I did.

Telstra has come to the rescue again. It should be all right. But as I am not the person who has the home phone account in thier name, dramas are expected.

Mainly for me. Telstra is hopeless. Useless idiots, I told the nice lady (Hannah) where to send it and to whom. Turns out, it came here, with my partner's name in it and only a partial address. Lucky there are nice people on the floor otherwise I would have never seen it.

Tonight I will attempt to set it up. Should be great fun (yawn). Jeez the antenna thingo looks a bit cheap. The Optus one looked a lot sturdier. Will have to see.

But the idea of getting the wireless in the first place, is that they are merging all our internet stuff here into a server in Sydney. We suspect it is so they can monitor what we are up to. Would not be the least bit surprised if this is the case.

With the wireless card, I can do my surfing at home, and with the 20 hours of downloads a month, it should be hunky dory. There are a few things I want to look at on a regular basis (not the hun!) and the only way I can do it without alerting people is doing it at home.

And the wireless connection means I don't have to sit in the cold study to see what's out there. Excellent. I will report more later, Captain!

Not much really

I'm trying to update the Blog a bit more often, as I am committed to my (admittedly very few) readers.

I am even going to start putting up stuff that I have written moons ago. Hopefully you will find them worthwhile and may even get a laugh out it.

Most of it was the under grad 'yeah beer - boo government' type of rant, but I like to think I've matured since then. However, the disturbing post regarding Highpoint Shopping Centre might put pay to that.

I've finally got a full Flickr account too. So I am now putting up a bootload of photos I've taken since I got my digital camera. For those of you who don't know, I purchased it while I was in Korea seeing my good mate Phillip, who lives over there now.

He spoke in the native tongue, waved his hands in the air, yelled a bit and then called me over. He got me a good deal and the price I paid for it over there, including a memory card, is less than they still cost over here. And I got it in Nov 04. It's a Canon G6, does more than I need. But I don't like using things that are smarter than me, so I leave most of the functionality off it.

I was trolling through the computer here and found this photo:

This was the first day I got the car to the right. It is a company car and does everythng I need it to do.

When I got the Futura in March 03, it had just under 6,000 kms on it. It now has nearly 108,000. It has done me well. Comfy, eats up the country miles and the really good part, is that it has the special XR6 sports suspension on it. So it is actullay about 3-4 inches lower than the standard Falcon.

What that means is that it sits lower to the ground, and therefore scrapes against every thing. Speed humps - scrape. Gutters - scrape. Concrete parking stop things in car parks - scrape. I've recently had to replace the front stone gaurd as that was broken.

The only major damage to it is a scrape down the side where some idiot hit me in a car park. That's it. When they get rid of it in a year or so, they might get $7,000 as a trade in. Good luck.

More later.

iPod #3

Well it happened. The old iPod shat itself. So I had to get a new one. That's it there. That's a shit photo.

Not a bad price, but still a bit shitty for it fucking up. Oh well.

It's also black, not my first choice, but it is sorted now. I have to get a new iTrip too as Apple change the design of the iPod so my old one won't work now.

I think the new iTrip is better than the old anyway. It doesn't matter how loud you have it, the volume is now controlled by the stereo not the iPod. That's heaps better, and it has an LCD display so I know what station I am on.

Problem though. When I set my old iPod to shuffle albums, and then I selected shuffle songs on the front screen it used to go through all the albums on there. This new one now just shuffles ever song, so I never know what's coming up next. Now I have to go through to albums and hit play to listen to whole albums and not different songs.

I know this is what the hip younger generation want, but not me. I want to be able to get a shuffle of CDs. It's not too much of a drama, but enough to shit me. But I'll get through it.

The video feature is pretty cool too. Ive downloaded some of the Ricky Gervais podcasts, they are quite funny. And I am now downloading Rendezvous for the iPod. That will be great and should give me a pump up when I need it.

I've also been uploading more photos onto my Flckr account. There is a link at the side. There are photos on there of my cool new nephew, my trip to NZ my partner and I did in March 2005, photos from my European jaunt last October with my partner, and some photos from the Auburn Bowls Club. All good. Check out the Flickr site, as I am putting photos on there all the time, some even have humourous captions. Most don't.

That's it. More soon.