Blog

After having a generally quiet and normal working week last week, this one has started off with a bang.

Monday saw me driving down to the Gold Coast to replace a faulty computer in our small office down there. I didn't mind the drive, but it did take up much of the day just in transit.

Today was the real fireworks (not real ones of course), as a major Optus network outage not only severely affect our business, but much of the state in general.

We basically lost all connections to the Southern offices, and all our fixed and mobile … Read more →

Friday's news saw the 3G Apple iPhone get released, and thus crazy people queuing in the cold night and wetting themselves to get their hands on one. The Cult of Apple got their fix early that morning. As an aside, a friend who was there in Brisbane said that because Optus opened early to sell these things that they actually bypassed their standard credit history checks because that agency wasn't yet opened. Wait for the headlines of iPhone-induced bankruptcy.

Last night we actually had a quick play with one, as the same Mac-occult-membership-holding friend that queued up and got one … Read more →

It's been quite a busy week. Other than a fairly busy working week, the only thing that is blogable is me picking up Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 for the Wii for a very very cheap $35 in K-Mart's toy sale. I haven't played it that much yet, so we'll see how that goes.

The weekend went quickly enough. Saturday morning I got a haircut and then spent about an hour or so writing a script to fix some errors on this blog. A few weeks ago, after i got comment-spammed, i deleted the offending spam comments directly out of the … Read more →

Not only Spain, but football won in the European Championship final this morning. They showed that slick, attacking passing football can win games and win tournaments. The boring and dull defensive game, epitomised by the Italians and Greeks, that in recent times has proved effective in not losing games was ultimately outdone by proper and exciting football.

Spain play the Arsenal - and to an extent the Man Utd - way of football, and it was a joy to watch. In the final the Spanish midfield made the Germans look like schoolboys; the Germans could barely play the ball out … Read more →

This weekend we ended up mainly watching movies and me playing the newly released (newly released in Australia anyway) Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It's quite pathetic that this massive Nintendo game was released in Japan and the USA back in January and March respectively, but it's only been released in Europe and here now. Very, very poor form Nintendo.

I've played through the individual 'Subspace Emissary' missions in the game, and also a few games online. I was excited to play as Sonic, but once he was unlocked i didn't really fancy him too much in the game. He's … Read more →

We've just come home from a stirring game of indoor. Before the game we were 6th with only 6 points separating the top six teams. Today we played the second team, next week we play the 3rd team, and the week after that we play 1st team.

So playing the top 3 teams in three weeks could decide if we make the finals or not. The team we played today wiped the floor with us in the trials at the start of the season, but today we edged them out in a nail-biter.

We were losing 1-2 at half-time, but … Read more →

Yesterday finally saw the release of Firefox 3. It's been a while since Firefox 2 was released (over a year and a half now), so this has been a long time in coming.

Whilst 3.0 is definitely a significant improvement over 2, i don't really see that it's one and a half year's worth of improvement.

In terms of themes, like the release of 2.0, I initially strongly resisted the new theme. I only had to put up with it because the author of my previously used theme, Winestripe (the 1.5 theme that I had used for 2.0), hasn't … Read more →

Every now and then I stumble upon a website or online service that I think: "damn that was a simple idea, i wish i had thought of that", and consequently ponder the potential money that some other guy on the far side of the world is making off such an idea.

Sometimes that 'something' is a useful service, an idea, or something that is just so plain silly that it's guaranteed lots of people will find interesting or amusing that you can make a killing off advertising revenue.

That 'something' today was GraphJam.

The idea is pretty simple: let … Read more →

I know this entry is a bit late because the show started on the weekend, but the next major footballing tournament is upon us: the European Championships ( aka Euro 2008 ).

Sometimes i do feel a bit sorry for top-flight European players. After playing club football every week from late August until the end of May, every two years they don't get much of a holiday because they have to play in either the World Cup or the Euros.

Then i think about the hideous amounts of money they earn, and the feeling quickly goes away.

I actually like … Read more →

It's been an interesting week for me and my mobile. It started about a week ago when the battery life of the thing plummeted. Usually the battery lasts about a week, but literally overnight the battery started lasting only about a day, which needless to say sucks serious amounts of acidic battery discharge.

Acidic discharge would have explained the shorter life, but there wasn't anything that obvious as for a reason for the sudden change. I even updated the phone firmware from Nokia to see if that would fix the issue, but for about three days nothing seemed to … Read more →