To whom it may concern...

Wassup blog!

So I'm walking home the other day on beautiful sunny afternoon, when I spot an abandoned computer monitor on the side of the road. It's becoming an increasingly common sight these days, especially the old eye-destroying CRT monitors, but especially so in this particular street. Seems someone is always dumping stuff there.



I had almost walked past when I noticed a message pinned to the nearby tree. It reads:

To whom it may concern:

The number to call for general household rubbish pick-up is: 1300 655 006. This is a free service. Please show some consideration for fellow residents & do not just expect that someone else will clean up your pollution. Make the call if you leave the rubbish.

Thanks.

That's pretty cool. Sucks that the person had to go to all that effort though, must be a really easy life for the kind of person that can just leave shit on the ground without it troubling their conscience.

Oh, and also, buy some wine if you fancy ☺

RIP Sharkbait

We had a tragedy in the family yesterday - Tyler's pet goldfish died. It was his first pet, given to him for his 7th birthday not even a year ago. He was heartbroken, really upset about it, just cried & cried for hours the poor guy. It was really painful for us to see him so upset too.

So in memory of Sharkbait, Tyler drew this picture:



I asked him what the "POP" with a person in the "O" is. He said "That's me shrinking, it makes a POP noise". Then I noticed the little person in the fish bowl with Sharkbait. Then I suddenly had something very important I had to go and do in another room, something very grownup and manly that definitely wasn't wiping a tear from my eye too...

Bye Sharkbait, we'll miss you!

Cactus face

Cactus close-up, by r-z

"Hey Dad, what's that green plant with the spikes?"

"A Venus fly trap?"

"No, the other one"

"... you mean a cactus?"

"Yeah, your face is like a cactus!"


Apparently I have prickly whiskers, just like a cactus ☺

23" Cinema Display power adaptor failure

Thank you so much to the gentlemen working at the Maccentric service center in Chatswood!

This morning started out as though it was going to be "one of those" Mondays. A blackout over the weekend had taken out my beautiful 23" Cinema Display after having just received a notice from the power company that the rates were going up by more than 10%! Talk about adding insult to injury, but fortunately I'm here working in dual-monitor mode now and I've never appreciated it more.

Everything else in the house was fine when the power came back on, but the power/status LED on the Cinema Display was flashing in a peculiar way and not working. A bit of Googling lead to an Apple knowledge base page which revealed that the sequence of flashes indicated a problem with the power adaptor. So I made some calls to the local Apple stores asking after a replacement.

The closest store informed me that according to their technician it can be swapped out with a generic unit available from any electronics retailer. Made a mental note not to visit their "genius bar" and called the bigger store in the city where I was advised that a replacement part can in fact be ordered by making an appointment with the genius bar. I decided to skip that and went back to the Next Byte store I'd originally bought it from.

They referred me to the Maccentric service center which was just around the corner. Turns out they actually had a replacement unit in stock! I bought it, took it home, plugged it in and - got the same flashing status light. Shit, at this point I'm worried that my worst fears have been confirmed and the monitor itself has been damaged. I had to call them back anyway to give the serial no. of the monitor, and when I did the guy suggested that I bring it back in to try it with the PSU from a 30" Cinema Display because he had seen that fix the problem before.

Not an hour later I had dusted it off, packed it up, and driven it back into the store. Unbelievably, they also had a 30" PSU in stock as well, so we unpacked it, plugged it all into a Mac Pro on a test bench, and my beloved Cinema Display sprang back to life! I just had to pay the difference between the 2 PSU models and the problem was solved!

So I highly recommend Maccentric for any Mac repairs you might need, the staff were knowledgeable and professional, and by recommending a $140 power adaptor they saved me from having to replace a very expensive and beloved monitor.

Thank you again to the Maccentric service center, Spring St. Chatswood!
http://www.maccentric.com.au/home/contact/

(And a big F-U to Energy Australia for blowing it up in the first place!)

Clouds and planets

Hello blog, it's been a while! How's things? I've been busy over on Twitter: http://twitter.com/beet

Austin Mini Planet by Hi I'm Santi

Just wanted to quickly recall a conversation I had with my son the other day:

We were walking home from school on a grey, rainy day when he asked me where planets come from. Whenever he asks anything which is even vaguely philosophical I always avoid offering my own opinion and just reply with "what do you think?".

He went on to say something along the lines of: "Well, clouds kind of stick together to make rain drops, so maybe planets were made the same kind of way. Maybe there was all this dust and stuff and it kind of stuck together and turned into planets."

I was taken aback and had to ask if he'd heard something like that somewhere before. He then went on to ask where plants and animals came from, and how people were made. Maybe the cloudy weather had him in a contemplative mood that day.

Fortunately we arrived home just in time to save me from having to either offer my own opinion or pretend I don't have one. I really want him to keep asking awesome questions like that and find his own answers as he grows up.

He never ceases to amaze me with how a child's mind which has been spared any kind of indoctrination can see things so clearly sometimes.

Green bins

An update to the ongoing saga with the gardens in our rented town house:

I've previously mentioned our real estate agent sending us a confrontational email about being in "breach of contract" because the gardens were not up to spec. Well recently we received a much more civil email asking us to attend to some creeper vines taking over the front garden. We've just renewed our lease for another 12 months, at a 4% rent increase, and were assured that the weed situation would be taken care of by a contractor because the weeds were present before we moved in. Two quotes from independent contractors later, nothing happens, and I get an email asking me to attend to it...

What we thought were some nice little bushes have since proved themselves to be be poplar trees by growing from only a few feet to over 1 story high. Meanwhile, the creeper vines do their part to try and overtake the garden by continually overgrowing and if left unchecked inevitably covering everything. This is the second time I've had to spend a day getting rid of them.

Rather than making a big deal of it, I reported that I have removed the vines, and asked if when a contractor does finally come to attend to the poplar trees they could dispose of them. The reply simply asked if I can just use our green bin. To explain, each of the 30 or so town houses in this strata have a tiny wheely bin for general rubbish which is collected daily, and those with gardens are supposed to have an additional green bin which can be used for garden waste, but only once a month or something. The closest thing to a green bin present at the property when we moved in looked like this:




The agent was aware of this, having received the very same photo via email and then coming to inspect the situation in person after we moved in over a year ago. Nothing has been done since, but rather than a pile of crap in one corner of the garden I'm fairly sure that we should have been provided with a functional green bin. Actually, there shouldn't have been any noxious weeds in the garden in the first place, and if there are it is certainly not the tenants responsibility to dispose of them...

Well fuck it, we're thinking about buying something soon, but we'd have to think twice before buying from this agent.

Conroy wants $43 BILLION dollars to build his own damn broadband network then...

In his relentless pursuit of Australian internet censorship, Senator Stephen Conroy has proposed that the federal government let him build his own fourty three billion dollar broadband network, undoubtably with filtering built in. Our 3 main ISPs, Telstra, Optus, and IInet have refused to participate, so he thinks he'll just roll out his own... the man is clearly insane.

Listen Conroy: we don't need faster internet connections, we need more bandwidth!!! We also don't want or need a mandatory internet filter.