jeremy.id.au

Almost three years ago, I was coerced into buying the Applecare Protection Plan for my iBook G4 at the last minute by the reseller. I still don’t agree with his tactics today, springing it on me when I went in to pickup my built to order machine that I had ordered weeks early. Resellers should be open and frank with their customers about these options from the beginning, if they don’t want to be considered by their customers to be dodgy. Neither did he tell me that I had to buy it then and there on the spot, but that I had up to twelve months to do so. However, the fact that reseller margins are slim on computers but much juicier on these plans probably explains it a little.

I later learnt that you can also withdraw from the AppleCare plan at anytime within the first 12 months without incurring any costs other than any phone support and perhaps a cancellation fee. Though I decided to keep it anyway. Two years in, however, and I was beginning to wonder whether it had been worthwhile as I never use the support and nothing had gone wrong. I enquired with Apple about having the keyboard replaced, as it was seriously fading and starting to lose some letters. They informed me that I had to take it into an Authorised Service Centre which seemed like a bit of effort for something relatively minor (except when you try to have non-touch typists use your computer) with no guaranteed outcome. Though I promised myself that I’d at least attempt it before the three year warranty plan expired. The keyboard became worse with time so it was on my mind to do something about it sooner rather than later.

Until suddenly last week, I got into uni to find that my iBook wouldn’t wake up nor even boot. No boot up sound or anything, just the fans going crazy along with a blank screen. Straight away I knew there was something seriously wrong with my iBook. Though I felt assured that I still had two to three months left under warranty. While in the corner of my mind I hoped that Apple would just replace it with a MacBook, I knew that wouldn’t happen. So I dropped it into a service centre near my uni where I also asked them to look into the keyboard. It seemed strange to be dropping it off for repair so soon after it had happened. Certainly, it was almost felt depressing to come home with an empty laptop bag.

Getting by for a week without a laptop, with only an iMac G3 to use, was rather painful. Being chained to the back wall of the study certainly doesn’t have that sense of freedom as a laptop on wireless. Six days elapsed before I decided I would give the service centre a call to see what the go was. As it turns out the Logic Board (motherboard) had died and there was no hesitation in replacing the keyboard. It certainly seems that the AppleCare had been worthwhile (and lucky that it happened now rather than after the AppleCare had expired). The cost of paying for such replacements myself probably wouldn’t be insignificant. After only waiting a week I was able to pick my laptop up yesterday.

Now while it may seem dubious to pay a considerable amount to keep an obsolete machine working so many years later, it’s certainly much better than being forced into making a two grand on the spot purchase. Possibly even waiting several weeks to receive a built to order system. It means I can defer such a MacBook purchase until later on when I really need it (and yes this time I’ll be planning to get AppleCare from the outset). Plus I’ll still have this machine as a backup or if that’s not necessary I may be able to get a bit of cash for it.

Well it’s nice to have my iBook back now with its nice shiny new keyboard.

Update: Seems I spoke too soon. Only four days after the first repair, I had the misfortune of having my iBook die again. Finally after another week without a laptop, I got it back and all appears to be well for the time being.

Well we have just moved from the house that I’ve been living in for the last five and half years (since dad died), which is also the house that I grew up in. Though five and a half years is nothing; Mum had been living there for over thirty-three years!

Needless to say it has been a mammoth effort, with over a week of shuffling backwards and forwards. Emptying of the old house being only completed today. So goodbye to my childhood home and the house that I’ve spent almost twenty years of my life living in.

While now I endure the pain of dialup, as I wait to have broadband reconnected. So far ‘rejected’ by Telstra, though ‘correctable’. Also, many boxes remain unpacked. Though we have moved to an area that is greener and possibly more prestigious, it appears to lack the life that the old area had. Let alone, the selection of take away food and restaurants we had.

I promise something that wasn’t to do with bike riding, so here it is (took me long enough). Recently my old mobile phone started playing up. The replacement phone I chose was the Nokia E60 so here’s the verdict.

I’ve never really been a fan of Nokia phones, though I was more or less sold by the features. A phone that supports WiFi (802.11g even) sounded quite useful. It certainly has its uses; this includes checking my emails in the morning without having to wait for my laptop to wake from sleep and I have been able to use it for net access from some open wireless access points. Overall, however, I would say I haven’t been wooed by Nokia from this phone.

First of all, it’s not quite like my old Siemens ME45. That phone fits snug in your hand, feels very solid and you couldn’t wish for it any smaller. My only regret with this old phone was that it had a monochrome screen when colour ones were just coming out and the lack of bluetooth. I’m sure there were things I was disappointed about though after the years I’ve forgotten what they would have been (at 3.5 years, it lasted very well).

Now compare this to the Nokia E60, width and length, it’s not much larger than my old phone though the old phone has curved sides which seems to make a fair difference. I could fit the old phone in my pocket along with my ipod a lot easier. Though on the positive side it’s thinner so it’s less visible through my pockets if I’m wearing jeans and I don’t have my ipod. It’s not as comfortable to hold and it hasn’t got the same shock-resistant design though fortunately I haven’t dropped it yet.

More on the positive side, Bluetooth syncability has been a great addition. While my old phone could be synced over IrDA and rs232, this became obsolete when my new laptop didn’t have either. And while I used to to back up contacts, the calendar only had miniscule storage capacity so I didn’t use it. Being able to sync it with iCal on my mac has been a great enhancement, not only for appointments and meetings, though to-do items as well. This probably justifies the new phone, though it could have been achieved with any bluetooth phone. It didn’t have to be a Nokia or WiFi capable.

The negatives would have to include user interface design. Many people rant and rave about how user friendly Nokia phones are, though I’m now suspecting that this is nothing but a myth (it’s possibly that most of these people are just the long time Nokia users). Now while the interface hasn’t been impossible to figure out (probably only because I’m tech savvy), however it has been far from logical. For example, I spent ages trying to figure out how to get the in-call timer showing (i.e. the thing that shows the duration of the call as you speak). Anyone would swear that the setting for this should be found in the main Settings menu, however, it was buried away in a settings menu in the part where you actually go to view recent call times, etc.

Another downside is that it didn’t ship with a stopwatch or a countdown timer. You’d think that such a sophisticated phone would have such a basic and trivial feature, but no. Not to worry, there are some third party programs for this though, some that cost an arm and a leg if you want the Symbian polished looking native version. Though if you search a bit further you’ll find some free J2ME ones that are a bit trickier to figure out, but appear to do the job.

Another let down is that although the phone supports VoIP calls over WiFi using SIP, it doesn’t cope with NAT traversal at all and I’ve yet to get my local asterisk setup going properly yet. Another funny thing is with task management, unless you quit an application it continues to run though if another app needs memory and there isn’t any free, then an app in the background may get closed. Yet there isn’t actually any way to see which apps are currently open. I guess it’s not such a huge problems but that’s probably one of the things that differentiates Symbian from a real operating system. In any case, I suppose it’s not a PDA after all though.

While there are probably other issues, that is probably enough to detail for now. I’m sure I can make do with this phone for now. Though the question is, will it last another 3.5 years like the old one?

It’s not often that you see the clock on the silo saying eleven degrees while it’s the month of May. Certainly it’s the first time I’ve seen it since they refurbished the clock. Though I wasn’t high on the hill, nor was I looking over the bridge, but I was on the train instead (and I did whiz past the MCG).

This time last year the clock was in pieces so it wasn’t displaying anything at all, let alone eleven degrees. However, I was almost wondering if it’d happen this year since a few other times when I’ve been past in the last month it’s been switched off. One other time it was displaying 60˚ (I hope it meant Fahrenheit in that instance otherwise 60˚ is damn hot!) then later that day it was also switched off. Additionally the LEDs don’t provide the same viewing angle as the previous lightbulb things. Doesn’t look as though the refurbishment has been too smooth.

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.

It’s always amusing to look at the logs and find what search terms people find your site with, particularly if it’s a blog. Though the one that amuses me the most is this NineMSN one. Despite the fact that I’m no fan of MSN Messenger or even hotmail and the various Microsoft web sites, it still decides that it wants to make me *the* Jeremy from the land of Australia. And yes, some people have actually stumbled across my site through this search as that is after all how I found it by looking at the referral info in the logs.

While most people seem to find my site through Google which terms such as:

• Gosia Piotrowska, the actress from Spellbinder who played Riana, one of the main characters.
• Someone else was trying to find something on the frustration of city life. Unfortunately I don’t have any video clips to offer though I’m sure you wouldn’t have to go far with a DV cam to find some traffic congestion or overcrowded trains in this city.
• Finally we have someone looking for a ticket to mayhem, well our ticket inspectors right here in Melbourne may offer you that.

There are many others and I haven’t really checked to see which bring the greatest number of visitors just that these stood out after a quick look in the logs.

Last week I finally bought a scanner, which is about the first time I’ve had a scanner at home for years. I ended up getting a fairly low-end Epson Perfection 3490 scanner, since for the moment if I want to do a few more decent scans I can do it on one of the $2,000 Epson Expression 1680 scanners at TAFE (if I ever get there). Though already I can see that it’s hard to get a scan that looks anything like the original.

Nonetheless, back in 1998 when I was a young teenager some friends wanted to do some go-karting down at Port Melbourne. So one of them convinced his dad to drive us, though on the way back we went via Victoria Dock. By that stage the harbour was closed as the “Bolte Bridge” (as it was later named) was beginning to block the way for ships. By that stage the docks had been abandoned and we could drive right out onto the wharf. There was something I liked about the baron atmosphere so not long later I went back with my own father along with the old Pentax SLR camera. So I took these photos in the Winter of 1998, knowing that the place was about to undergo a major change. Despite my dislike of freeways (a number of them are of the bridge construction), they do look rather impressive. I made a number of subsequent trips back to the place, amazed at the lack of graffiti despite being only minutes from the central city. While the horse stables (used for those horse and carriage rides that you see around the CBD) made it almost feel as though the place was stuck in a time warp.

Later in the year Kennett had one of his massive open days where he’d open up all his projects, so I was able to get some inside shots of the Docklands Stadium as it was under construction. Later I also took some pictures of some other parts of Melbourne for a web site that I had created. Though some of the shots had been scanned overtime, the scans have long been missing. So here they are, also to be compared with the same location but earlier this year:

• Melbourne 1998
• Victoria Harbour (April 2005)

Had the strangest phone call today:

Me: “Hello?”
Them: “Hi, is that Jeremy?”
Me: “Yeah”
Them: “It’s Aunty Di”
Me: “Who?”
Them: “It’s Aunty Di, I’m after trying to find your Mum’s phone number”
Me: “Sorry, I’m not quite sure who that is, I don’t have an Aunty called Di”
Them: “Oh, this is Jeremy right?”
Me: “Yes”
Them: “Jeremy H?” (started with H)
Me: “No”
Them: “Sorry, I must have the wrong phone number then.”

Now to work out who this Di is and why they’ve got my name and telephone number!

I signed up to give SMS.ac a try having received an invitation way back in early 2003. There existed hardly any of the warnings about this site that you can now find plastered all over the web today. I thought it might be handy for sending the occasional free SMS (there did exist some geniune free SMS sites in the past), though I never tried using it, which is just as well as I’ve since heard that they charge these messages as a premium SMS to your friends phone account.

In the mean time i received a fair few spam messages to an email address I didn’t even sign up to their site with, alleging to be from friends. Eventually I did go back and check the site out and all, again I didn’t find much use for it and found it annoying as hell because they had some flash player thingamajigs that keep blaring mobile phone ring tones.

At some stage earlier this year, however, I started getting annoying SMS messages from SMS.ac. I didn’t think much of it, except they were annoying so I went back to the site once again trying to figure out how to stop it. All to no avail. Little did I know I was being charged for the messages which were being sent as “premium content”. Having gone back to the site again, the only way you could find any instructions on how to disable these messages is if you go to billing (which I didn’t since I never gave them any credit card details) or closing your account (which I did go to eventually due to sheer frustration). I certainly had never requested such ‘premium’ messages through their site or my phone.

Though the question is, how can charges be made to a phone when such services were never requested, especially through the mobile phone itself. This is clearly a scam. Even Telstra’s own Customer Terms clearly state that such charged content can only be accessed “from your mobile
phone”.

Telstra’s customer service people of course proved to be unhelpful and claimed that Telstra is powerless and has no responsibility over such ‘premium’ SMS billing. They told me I had to contact 5th Finger for any refunds, who in turn were referring me back to SMS.ac in the US. That is until I mentioned the magic TIO word back to Telstra and proceeded to lodge a complaint with the ombudsman. They eventually refunded $14 or so (at $0.55 per a message), however, while I was pleased that they refunded something I’m not even entirely sure if this amount is accurate. I have some indication that it may have been more than this. Though the fact that it’s a pre-paid account certainly doesn’t help.

In addition it appears that Vodafone NZ were doing some investigations over SMS.ac.

So stay away from SMS.ac at all costs. Though if you’ve been stung already, don’t take your phone company for face value that they can’t do anything because they can. If you’re in Australia there’s TIO, you could also report it to ACCC as a scam (in which case be sure to mention that 5th Finger, as the local company, facilitating it) or if you’re fed up with spam from SMS.ac then you could report it to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (again if you mention their local links, that is 5th Finger, this could help).