jeremy.id.au

Well I have done it, I’ve joined that tribe where they all walk around wearing white earbuds. I’m now the proud owner of one of these iPod things. It’s one of the slightly larger ones with the colour screens as I decided I’d rather store my entire music collection on it. No messing around with shuffling my songs around to keep fresh ones on the iPod. It also can store all my photos, which is handy, although the small LCD display will never compare to viewing them in full size on a computer.

I’ve pondered buying an iPod in the past before they had really even become as popular as they are now. The cost was an obstacle though thanks to my recent 21st birthday that was kinda resolved. My more recent conern was the fact that you can’t play OGG Vorbis files with an iPod. Though it was the fact that I have a relatively long commute to Brunswick that was the last straw and made portable music a rather urgent matter.

Of course, there are some alternatives to the iPod that can play OGG but nothing that compares (not to mention that they are mostly Windows CE based). So I’ve frantically been re-encoding my entire CD collection into AAC. I can hear open source purists cringing already. However, AAC is slightly better quality than OGG and it is an open standard, although the patients don’t do justice to open source. None the less, I still have a copy of the OGG files floating around, not to mention the original cds. Ultimately I should probably encode my collection to a lossless format someday.

The one other downside is that they no longer ship with firewire cables. This is annoying since my iBook actually has a firewire port. So any PC iPod owners out there without a need for the firewire cable? Otherwise, I’m off to the Apple Edu Store to buy one.

Welcome to my new blog. I have long been blogging with jogger though it was overly simple so I’ve decided to replace it with something new. So now people can add comments to anything that I write. I’ve already managed to import all my old jogger posts.

So what’s been happening in my life lately? Have been attempting TAFE at RMIT doing Computer Systems. Don’t know how I’ll go, however, as I’ve been missing a few classes (whoops) and haven’t really kept track of what we’re meant to be doing.

In other news I turn 21 in a week. Yet unfortunately I don’t have a lot planned. I suspect it’ll just be just a family thing as I haven’t kept up with most of my friends since my teenage years.

Pictures of the New Zealand trip have been uploaded to a gallery. Though note that there is probably still some sorting out to do so only the best pictures are shown there.

Having come back from New Zealand I felt a new lease of life. This had me motivated to do some things that I perhaps wouldn’t have done for the past year. I thought of starting a small business or even getting a job. I thought up some marketing ideas for an IT business but didn’t manage to get out to test my ideas.

In the mean time I decided I needed a new computer. Well sure, my PC was fine, even though it was the same dual celeron 466Mhz (with 512 meg of RAM) computer that I’d been using for around 3 years (having inherited it when my dad died).  But I was fed up with being fed up with being tied to my desk to use the computer, instead, I wanted a laptop. My old laptop as nice as it was, weighing in at hardly a kilo, was ready for the trash as it constantly locks up. The next bit probably comes as a surprise to some people. I had been using Linux for over 5 years and here I was going out to purchase an iBook. Though I’d been contemplating an Apple purchase for a while. For quite some time I’ve thought that the hardware was nice, though I never really thought about what I’d do with such a machine, after all Linux runs on everything.

But there was perhaps something else lurching at me. Here we have Mac OS X, one of the most usable operating systems and it has a Unix core! Hardly four years earlier when I got my last laptop, I remember the joys of spending an entire long weekend fine tuning Linux when I should have been studying. Fortunately with a distribution such as Debian, once you install, you should never have to reinstall again. Though with a laptop, you usually want it to *just work*. Additionally, I was faced with other problems. Software in Linux was often lacking, there were no decent office productivity apps. I liked the way Abiword was so lightweight, but the dialogues stating to insert code at line 547 of abc.c for said feature weren’t too helpful. It wasn’t for another year or so until OpenOffice was an option.

I still like Linux. From a technical point of view it’s probably my favourite OS (particularly the Debian variety). However, Mac OS X Aqua is probably one of the greatest desktop environments that I’ve used. I couldn’t do without features such as Exposé. In fact when I went back to my Linux PC to do some things, I kept hitting F9 to no avail. Probably the main areas of disappoint are to do with things like terminal emulation. Terminal.app claims to be an xterm, however, it’s keybindings differ and so causing problems with backspace. With some work arounds the problem has been minimal. Other than that, there’s an annoying 802.1x bug. So I love my iBook, though I’m no Apple loyalist and remain skeptical of some their tactics. Still, I think it’s great that there is an alternative to the Intel PC running Microsoft Windows that everyone can use.

Only about a month after I had my new iBook, the inevitable happened. My PC power supply blew and took half the PC with it. One would almost think it had some concious of jealousy. Though in all reality it was probably going to happen anyway and it’s just as well I had a backup computer.

At the same time as purchasing the iBook, the Apple Centre owner offered me some work because he was interested in my *nix skills. I took the offer because I thought the general experience would be worthwhile. Worked there for about a month, though it was nothing exciting.

Having just taken the Jabber Australia Forums online and seeing moderate success, I thought I’d have a go at some Melbourne Visitor Forums (though not to forget that it’s for locals as well). No one has posted there yet :s but hopefully someone will find it useful at some stage!

Been a while since I blogged. It was my birthday on the 1st of June (come on people, where are the presents?).

Today I was in The Age and then consequently Slashdot (a good way to stress test that server!). Worth a read….

My life’s been generally bland these days. Shrug. What can I say? I’ve just been staying at home waiting for something to happen, but I don’t care. I’ve pretty much been doing nothing.

Hehe, okay I got that out of The Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator. It’s not quite how my life is, but you get the drift!

Looks like the official jogger is still down. Good thing I installed this one!

Today when I was at school in the library, I was reading yesterday’s The Age newspaper when I came across this letter to the editor that I wrote:

Alston out of touch

Once again Senator Alston has totally missed the point.

In an interview on ABC television he explained that pornography is responsible for the take-up of broadband. I’ve had broadband for a year and a half and never even dreamt of looking up porn. I use it for communication and research.

After deciding that I wanted broadband in 1997, it was a three-year wait until I could get it. By which time I had moved houses in hope of getting cable, only to discover that Optus@Home didn’t service townhouses/apartments. Telstra wasn’t even trying to compete, with its measly 400kbps cap and its pricing. Eventually we found that we could get ADSL at twice the price of Optus and a fraction of the speed. That didn’t last long, with iPrimus essentially dropping out of the broadband game. Finally I was able to get Optus@Home at a different house, only to find 12 months later that I am about to go back on a Telstra-style cap.

Senator Alston later makes out that competition is the only solution. I don’t know where Senator Alston expects this competition to come from since he has let a big monster by the name of Telstra loose to do what it wants. The only solution is to split Telstra into two but he fails to see that.

Cisco quiz: “When might the router setup mode be executed?” “The router is ‘fresh’ out of the box” (multichoice answer) mmmmmm I love the smell of fresh routers!

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

Well that article appeared in The Age today. You can read it online or in Today’s Age in the Next (IT) section on page 5.

I was quoted for saying:
“My main concern with the proposed settlement is that it explicitly denies access to individuals, not-for-profit organisations and government organisations for API, documentation and communications protocols. This information should be available to the public at no charge”

Along with my quote was a little portrait:

Well I guess it had to happen sometime. The otherday I journalist interviewed me by email because I made a submission to the US Department of Justice. The journalist was from a local newspaper (The Age) and said he was looking for submissions made by Australians. A week later (yesterday) I received a phone call asking if they could take a photo of me to put with the submission. I agreed so it was taken today.

Funny how they go looking for your details. He found my email address (I’m guessing he performed a google search on my name) and my phone number (obviously not had to get either).