The Hood

Dell doesn’t want my business

I have been eyeing off several mini “netbook” computers to replace my old laptop. The battery is starting to wear out and a full charge will generally only last an hour now.

The one I wanted was the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and as I’ve been running Ubuntu for years it was good to not have to pay the “Microsoft tax”.

Alas trying to order from the US with an Australian account site actually crashes the Dell site! Even trying to “chat” doesn’t work, so I left them a message. They actually called me (to their credit) and told me that there is no market for Linux in Australia.

I find that interesting given that almost all the reviews on their own site complain about the lack of Ubuntu!

I want everyone to do the same and let Dell know there is demand for Linux in Australia.

I have a spare $600-800 that I’m looking at spending soon. (I have an “ideal netbook” post in my drafts I’ll publish when I finalise it…)

Update: I just got an email from Dell telling me my order is about to expire, but when I try and log in it can’t find my account. It must have a confusion somewhere as it wouldn’t let me save my order, but apparently it has.

Google Chrome first looks

I just downloaded the new Google Chrome browser and it is quite interesting.

It doesn’t feel much faster than Firefox 3 on this computer. I’ll need to do more testing and I’ll update this post.

The User Agent is “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″ which makes sure things are picked up!

Internet shaped at work

Some bright spark decided to download 26GB of stuff a few days into our billing month, which pushed us seriously close to our (peak) 40GB download limit. Then somehow there were several days with 3-4GB of downloads (even on a Saturday!) – normally usage is less than 1GB per day.

All this means our 11Mbps ADSL2+ is shaped to 64kbps, and will be for another 3 weeks. Dial-up speeds shared between 6 people, plus mail server, VPN connections and Skype accounts. I’m actually alone in the office at the moment and it is annoyingly slow! That said, TPG’s shaping is actually quite good: things aren’t timing out like what happened when I was once shaped on WestNet.

Tomorrow everyone returns and I wonder how an Internet-based company can do work with such pitiful Internet. We might have to double the monthly spend and get a 100GB plan, instead of the 40GB (plus 110GB usable between 3am and 9am, which is basically useless in an office).

Ekka show bag

Not just any show bag, but one containing some really hot chilli sauce, from The Chilli Factory! I got some 10++/10 sauce which was actually quite tasty. I was told it was as hot as a sauce can get without cheating and using chilli extract (like the Megadeath sauce at Off the Wall). I’ll be using it in cooking when the wife won’t be eating it…

The bag also contained a “chilli lollypop” which wasn’t really hot but still interesting.

iMacs are cool (except when they are running Windows)

Went to a client training site today (my work is quoting on a new sales tool for that company, and we were checking out their current tool) and it was a room full of iMacs. This is the room where they train new sales people on their products and how to sell it.

However each one is running Windows XP! They had also been been stripped out of useful programs (not even paint or wordpad remains) and were running at 1280×768 for some reason (native resolution for 20 inch iMac is 1680×1050). The actual sales tool runs really slowly, even though it runs over a 100Mbps network (this was one of the many reasons for the rebuild).

I suppose this was the company that migrated to a brand new .Net based billing system (”Windows is cool”). The deployment was delayed by a year because it didn’t work (and still doesn’t work properly months later: still much slower than their old system and lots of bugs).

Pizza for dinner

I have found the best pizza: from Oxenford near Movie World on the Gold Coast. We have it every fortnight. Mmmm!

Broken Down Car

My car is broken down. The first time this week I was able to leave work on time and now the car won’t start! I’m sitting here waiting for RACQ to show up…

Outages today

I was mostly unaffected, except having no mobile phone reception for the entire morning. My work internet and phones are through other companies and we didn’t notice anything. The Boss was out of the office and his mobile is through Three so we couldn’t call him. No great loss.

The housemate also once called to tell me the power was out. My thought was that as Origin Energy have never issued a bill (after 5 months living here) they finally disconnected us. But it turned out he is an idiot and washing the jaffle maker with it plugged in and it tripped the safety switch…

Telstra iPhone plan

(This is a little later than I originally hoped)

The Australian IT News has a feedback/discussion area but I have not been able to get it to work.

This is my reply to “iPhone: Telstra can’t beat Optus”

Telstra charges $2 per megabyte (!!!) on their standard plan. When I viewed that page it was around 700KB (according to Firebug) which means Telstra users would be charged $1.40 to view a single news article. With $10 a month of “data credit” one would be up for extra charges in no time.

This is the same as other Telstra plans, namely the $29.95 per month which allows 200MB of downloads, with excess at 15c/MB ($150/GB). This plan is available on both 256kbps and 8Mbps cable, so the allowance can be gone in only a few minutes, leaving many with huge excess bills. (Ignoring the fact they charge for uploads, extra email addresses, etc)

Telstra: proudly ripping off people who don’t know better. (aka people who think the Great Wall of China was built to keep the rabbits out)

No Sleep

I often can’t sleep. It can take me hours to get to sleep at night, even actively trying to think of “nothing” or the usual tricks like counting sheep. If I’m woken up I often can’t fall asleep again easily.

Which is why I’m up at 5am. I was awoken by the puppy’s alarm. She was given a small clock to simulate her mother’s heartbeat but her chewing it keeps bumping the alarm switch so it went off.