jeremy.id.au

I’m probably the person you’d least expect to take an interest in the Commonwealth Games. Hell, I hardly even took any interest at all until they were nearly here and to many extents, sold out. Still it turned out to be a somewhat interesting ten days.

Probably the first thing I noticed was that off-peak public transport was far more crowded than usual. Standing room only when ever I got on at Box Hill, only to become packed like sardines beyond Camberwell. Some of this can probably be attributed to school holidays alone, though not usually beyond the level that you wouldn’t be able to get a seat. Though I also took some time to watch the opening ceremony on TV. It wasn’t as flash as the Olympics, though there were a few impressive moments, such as the tram with whings (where did they get all the conductors from these days?).

On the first weekend of the games, I stayed the night at my brothers place and had a bit of an enjoyable time watching the games on TV, including various things as gymnastics, swimming, etc. The next morning I couldn’t pull myself away from the television as Kerryn McCann was about to win the Marathon. None the less, after that I didn’t watch any more on TV, I did turn the TV on for a moment though unlike at my brothers house, there just wasn’t the choice to watch whatever I preferred of four different events. So after that again, it was back to the crowded public transport being the only thing reminding me that the games were on.

However, on Friday night I went with some friends to an event at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. It was the combined Army, Airforce and Navy bands and although there are many great events held in the music bowl every summer, this was part of a range of events put on during the Commonwealth Games. Perhaps not so ‘gamesish’ though the additional crowds around town and the improved public transport services were something to note.

Though the highlight the Games for me would have to have been going to the Cycling Road Race on Sunday. As spectators it involved plenty of walking as we wanted to check out the course from various locations, so needless to say with this and the 31˚C heat (not to mention the poor buggers out racing in it) we were buggered by the end of the day. Oh yes and I did grab some photos before the camera batteries went flat, they are availble in my gallery and on flickr. Still there was nothing like the sense of exhilaration as we watched Matt Hayman finish the race, winning gold.

Well that’s my wrap up of the Commonwealth Games.

Well the time came to replace mum’s 14″ CRT monitor. In actual fact she started off with a 15″ monitor though when it died we temporarily hooked up the 14″ monitor, though she had no desire to replace it. Fortunately, for the best part of the last year she was able to use my brother’s 17″ LCD monitor while he was away in Canada but once he got back he was quick to reclaim it. In the end though, it wasn’t just the monitor we replaced, it was the whole computer.

Pictured: The old 14″ monitor, PC, our networked HP Laserjet 4 (with Postscript level 2 support) and yes, you get a glimpse of the replacement system already.

So it was a Mac I decided to get, mainly because I wanted something capable of running OS X. Previously, of all things, she had been running Linux. It was probably the right decision to run Linux at the time, after all we’ve had not a single virus infestation and I was immensely put off running Windows after a spyware toolbar got into Internet Explorer within weeks and just wouldn’t go away no matter what we did. Further more, contrary to what many people believe Linux can be simplified for the end user to quite a degree meaning that no technical knowledge at all is required to run it. However, even still in my opinion KDE still has a rather clumsy GUI and the Debian system resulted in quite a fair bit more work for me. For example, when we wanted to set it up for the digital camera, it involved quite a lot of messing around with file permissions and USB before I could get it working. Compared to the Mac, I just have to plug in the digital camera and iPhoto loads up automatically (not to mention that the program for Linux that I found for organising photos was rather second rate).

For budgetary reasons it was a second hand iMac G3 "Snow" (that being the colour) that we settled for. At 500Mhz it is a fair bit more powerful than the previous 333Mhz Celeron and at 512MB it has twice the RAM. Other features include a CD-RW drive which the previous computer didn’t have, as well as a 40GB hard drive which is the same size as the previous computer.

Pictured: Mum’s new computer; iMac G3 "Snow"

So how about the performance? The G3 is two generations back for the PowerPC platform, yet now three generations for the Mac platform as a whole. Still the first thing I noticed when I turned it on was the incredible boot up time. If you’re used to making a cup of coffee while you wait for your computer to boot up, you’ll probably find that it is booted up and is ready before you even had the chance to turn the kettle on. I know some people achieve the same thing by installing old versions of Windows on their computer, though this is Tiger, the latest version of OS X. Okay though my iBook probably boots in the same time or slightly quicker, while the new Intel Macs are said to boot in 20 seconds. Still, boot up time isn’t all there is to performance.

Overall, performance wise the system is very usable. Instead of running slow, Apple tends to cut back on the eye candy. For example, the famous Exposé feature works though isn’t as smooth as it is on say a G4 mac. At times it may not be as responsive as a new system but it’s not painfully slow either. So overall I’m not disappointed with performance. Even still, the aim was to give mum a taste of the mac and in a few years time when she’s retiring she may well get a new one.

With one feature of Macs that is really nice, I was able to do an install using my OS X Tiger DVD using the DVD-ROM drive on my iBook using FireWire Target Disk Mode. Took my a while to migrate all the data. Can’t wait until next time it’s just another mac we’re upgrading to as I’ll simply be able to use Migration Assistant.

The verdict, well mum is pleased and she’s finding Mac OS X easy to use. The style of macs is also something great and as you can see from the photos, the form factor is much improved.

Yes, I’m posting this a bit late. None the less, last Saturday we had quite a significant downpour. First of all, I took the train out to Camberwell and noticed I was heading into dark storm clouds, it was just obvious that a storm was going to breakout though I didn’t realise how soon. Received an sms from a friend I was meeting saying the weather is terrible, yet got off the train and didn’t feel like the storm was going to hit all that soon. None the less, it hit when I was as far from shelter as possible. Well okay that wasn’t really much more than 50 metres or so but it was raining heavily enough that it was enough to get drenched. I caught some shelter then dashed for the Burke Road shops. I probably choose the worst time to cross Burke Road and that is when I got drenched the most as the wind was blowing the rain horizontally and the rain was at it’s heaviest. Even still, it was warm enough that it didn’t take long dry out.

On the way back, heading down Canterbury Rd in the car, the road was just about flooded in places, with streams of water either side and anywhere that the road was low there was water right across it, being sprayed into the air as cars went past. Closer to home the the stream the side of the road was so massive that there were just about some little mini cascades in places and the water was brown from picking up clay and silt. Fortunately, when we got to the front of my house it appeared as though the drainage was a little better and the road wasn’t flooded. Though again I must have chosen the worst time to dash for the house. As I stepped over the gutter it had become a raging current, while just inside the gate the footpath was all flooded with no way around it.

Fortunately with the way the land lines, our property doesn’t flood too much. Though due to some design issues with the house, a little bit of water does seep in through the pit (seating area with fireplace). A little bit also came in near the kitchen window. This is essentially because a massive amount of water flows off a valley in the roof and then the excess water that doesn’t make it into the down-pipe flows under the house.

Though the worst of it became apparent until a day or two later. On Sunday the phone line had become a little crackly and by Monday it wasn’t working at all. Strangely enough the ADSL was still working while the phone was completely dead, rather ironic when Telstra makes you have an active phone line for ADSL, yet it doesn’t even need to be working for the ADSL to work. So Telstra came out to test the line, finding that the fault was probably on our premises. In the one hour that I was actually out of the house on Wednesday they came and left a note to say we had missed them. Fortunately mum had called up our phone provider (AAPT) to see if it had been fixed and arranged for another Telstra tech to come the next day. Turns out it was the extension going to the kitchen that was causing problems, possibly dangling in the mud. The tech disconnected it until we can get someone out to run a new cable. Fortunately it wasn’t much to relocate the cordless phone to the first socket on the line.

So that’s that, by around midday Thursday, we finally had a working phone line.