I am happy to read the chapters and implement the things I learn all day every day; this kind of behaviour is a much more natural learning experience for me. Memorising tables, commands and state diagrams is not. Nor is playing dodge-ball with the sometimes extremely “Cisco-ified” questions wherein a slight misunderstanding of the wording can get you thinking in the wrong direction and ultimately missing the entire point of the question. This kind of misdirection in questions is the absolute worst way for me to incorrectly answer a question. It makes me feel cheated and contempt toward Cisco. Of course the cynical side of me would say that they have to do something to make the exams difficult, albeit the methods they use aren’t genuine. Single-word differences between two command syntaxes isn’t exactly testing the knowledge you would expect a CCNP-level technician to possess. The command interface on every Cisco device is interactive and has tab completion at a bare minimum, so as long as you know the first 3-5 letters of every command you wish to use, you can TAB-complete your entire 6,000 line configuration. Disingenuous. That’s a good word to describe this kind of exam question trickery.

Anyway, I should stop procrastinating on my blog and get back to it.

Force India did not attend FP2 yesterday because the team wanted to pack up and leave the circuit before dark in order to ensure the safety of the team members. That to me indicates there is a serious issue surrounding the F1 circus as it exists in Bahrain.

In terms of how the race can affect the issues in Bahrain: the ruling parties are keen to see it happen so they can “prove” that Bahrain is a great place to be in order to save face. The protestors are keen to see it happen, and also not keen to see it happen; firstly because they can use it as an opportunity to get international recognition (although this is unlikely) and secondly for exactly the opposite reason the ruling party wants to see the race run; they fear it is working toward legitimizing the current regime.

You have to realistically look at the protestors point of view. I mean, we aren’t really used to that form of government backlash in this country. Australians are simply too lazy to protest much of anything. Yet in Bahrain we have people risking their lives, going against the fucking military for christ sake, and what for? There must be a serious message they are trying to deliver. It’s not worth risking your life for something trivial. There is a chance they can get a slight exposure to the international community by protesting during the F1 broadcast, but seriously it’s an extremely slim chance – with the military physically blocading and protecting the circuit, the protestors would literally have to overwhelm and invade the circuit for it to be shown on the television. Even if a massive shitstorm was occuring just a few kilometres away you can be sure the cameras would do their utmost to avoid accidentally capturing any of it.

Channel 10 announced on their Facebook page a few days ago (link) that F1 broadcasts are moving from the HD channel “OneHD” to the SD channel 10. Channel 10 have stated this is to allow a “wider audience” of F1 fans to view the broadcast. In addition to the channel swap, the programming itself will start from 9.30PM in all time zones – this effectively means that viewers in SA and NT will be delayed by half an hour, and viewers in WA delayed by up to two hours. This is apparently also an attempt to get F1 viewers to a “wider audience”.

How cynical you are will determine the  kind of theories you have about the true motives behind these decisions. Channel 10 have stated they want F1 to be part of their “Super Sunday” broadcast – effectively a marketing push to collect several hours of popular programming into a prime-time slot of Sunday afternoon through evening. This was first done for the broadcast of the Australian GP due to its convenient broadcast time smack-bang in the middle of “Super Sunday”. My guess is that the “success” of the Australian GP broadcast has prompted this move to shoehorn all other F1 broadcasts into this time slot. Not only were more ad breaks than ever before seen on the Australian GP broadcast, more vapid talking heads than ever before seen were also present, thus making the broadcast “family friendly” and apparently helping it to appeal to a wider audience.

As you can see if you have clicked the link to Facebook above, nobody is happy about this decision. Approximately 150 negative comments were made on their post in the first day. Channel 10 seemingly doesn’t care, they posted this message in response:

We are wanting to bring F1 to the widest audience possible, which is why it is on Ten. This allows all Australians to access the Formula One coverage in a consistent time slot every Sunday night. Sorry, guys. This is locked in.

Since that post, several hundred more comments have been posted. The most poignant of which states “your schedule might be locked in, but your viewers aren’t” with several people posting references and links to online streaming of the F1 coverage.

What I want to do is send a message to Channel 10 to let them known this is simply unacceptable behaviour. I am annoyed personally because I am losing HD broadcast, most certainly gaining many more ads, and for some races throughout year will also be delayed. I live on the East coast of Australia, but it’s worse for the people on the West coast: all of the above, plus a two hour delay! What is the point of F1 live timing, F1 twitter accounts, and following each team’s respective ‘live postings’ on websites etc if there is no live coverage?

F1 broadcasting in Australia has always been terrible due to the structure of our commercial television networks and the timezone difference between here and where F1 happens. For a short while (2010, 2011 and the first three races of 2012), OneHD for the most part did a good job of broadcasting – all races live, almost all qualifying sessions live, and contrary to many complaints, I do feel they took minimal ad breaks.

We were given a bone, and now they’ve taken it away.

I would like all Australians to help me boycott Channel 10 and their sponsors. The following is a list of sponsors of the F1 on CH10/OneHD:

- Mercedes Benz
- Ashley & Martin
- TAGHeuer
- Swisse
- Harvey Norman
- Pedders
- Shannon’s Insurance
- Colli Hardware

I will provide contact details for these companies later.

Here are Channel 10′s contact details: http://ten.com.au/contact-us.htm
Sydney
1 Saunders Street
Pyrmont, NSW 2009
GPO BOX 10, Sydney, NSW 2001
Ph:   02 9650 1010
Fax:  02 9650 1111

Melbourne
Como Centre
Level 4, 620 Chapel Street
South Yarra, VIC 3141
Private Bag 5000, South Yarra, VIC 3141
Ph:  03 9275 1010
Fax: 03 9275 1011

Brisbane
Sir Samuel Griffith Drive
Mt Coot-tha, QLD 4066
GPO BOX 751, Brisbane, QLD 4001
Ph:  07 3214 1010
Fax: 07 3369 3786

Adelaide
80 Hutt Street
Adelaide, SA 5000
Locked Bag 10, Adelaide, SA 5001
Ph:  08 8225 1010
Fax: 08 8225 1011

Perth
Cottonwood Crescent
Perth, WA 6062
PO BOX 10, Mirrabooka, WA 6941
Ph:  08 9345 1010
Fax: 08 9344 8076

A list of their Twitter accounts:
One HD: @onehd
Ten Sport: @tensporttv
Craig Baird: @cbairdo
Greg Rust: @Thrusta1
Darryl Beattie: @Hanginfive

Their Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/TENsportTV

And a link to a discussion on Ten’s own forums about this very topic:
http://community.ten.com.au/community/other-ten-tv-shows/f/69/t/26774.aspx

Please can you all make every effort possible to contact Ten and let them know your displeasure at this move. Australians and non-Australians alike, please descend upon Channel 10′s contact points and overwhelm them with negative feedback. I would encourage people not to be vulgar or aggressive, merely state your displeasure and suggest you will be using alternative ways of watching the F1 coverage in the future.

Once you pair the watch via Bluetooth with your Android or iOS based smart phone you can then load a multitude of apps onto the watch to let it interface with your smart phone – and through your smart phone, the internet at large. Out of the box, the watch will support incoming Caller ID, e-mail (Gmail or any IMAP email account), calendar alerts, Facebook messages, Twitter, weather alerts, and silent vibrating alarm and timer. The list of possible uses for the phone is much larger than this, however, with the accelerometer and connection to the internet via smartphone it is possible to create many unique interactive experiences.

The project aimed to raise $100,000 over 40 days – the response, however, was phenomenal. The initial $100,000 was raised during the first two hours of the project page being live. As it currently stands, eight days later the amount pledge is $2,900,000 – that’s $2.9 million dollars. This is despite similar products already being available, e.g. Sony’s SmartWatch, the Imwatch, and others. This is because despite the Pebble not being first to market, it is smartest to market. I would say this is due to two important factors: first, the Pebble is going to provide an open API for developers using a standard gcc toolchain, meaning that anyone can develop for the Pebble without paying any licence fees or investing anything at all into the platform. Secondly, the Pebble makes use of e-ink display technology to give an estimated seven day battery life, which is a far better option than competing products which last for a day at most. Although this limits the display to monochrome, the physical size limitation of such a device does not lend itself to high quality graphical output even if the display were a high pixel density colour display – it would be like trying to squeeze modern smartphone apps onto an old Nokia mobile phone; or like printing postage stamps with 500 dpi resolution.

The project is due to deliver a final product around September. Needless to say I am very excited and will have trouble waiting that long!

My apologies.

Original:

Modified:

What do you think?

I have always like small cars. I can appreciate large cars but my personal preference is to buy small. My old car was also a small car. I enjoy not paying ridiculous amounts of money for insurance and road registration. I don’t use my car for anything but driving around, and rarely long distances, so large cars aren’t a necessary part of my lifestyle. I’m also relatively average height, so seating/roof height/footwells etc in small cars are rarely too small for me.

The Fiesta XR4 (or Fiesta ST as it is known in the UK) is special because it has a 2.0-litre engine from its big brother, the Ford Focus. Not only that but the engine has been tuned to provide more power (110Kw) and a better torque band (190Nm) which kicks in from around 3300RPM. The car also has sports suspension, a five-speed manual transmission, wide grippy tyres, a subtle bodykit and – if you are so inclined – racing stripes from the factory.

I first saw this car on an ancient episode of Top Gear – around 2005 or so – and was unimpressed to note the car wouldn’t be available in Australia until 2006. I researched it over and over and over until I had memorized every little detail about the car. I even took one for a test drive from a dealer. I was pretty much in love with this car (though not to the point that I actually made love to it). However, at the time I was still a uni student, and although I was working full time it was in a dead-end job. I could’ve technically afforded to buy it with all the on-road costs and a drive-away price around $28,000, but I would’ve had absolutely zero money to spend after that.

I watched the prices of them on the second-hand market over the next few years, all the while willing my current car to die so I would have an excuse to buy one. In the end, my old Nissan never really died. It is disabled but it’s not dead, but now it’s at a point where the cost to fix it would be worth more than the value of the car, so it makes financial sense. Plus Carly needs a car to drive to work in, and I just got a raise. So it was time.

I went searching and I was impressed when I saw this for sale:

As you can see it has stripes, though they aren’t ridiculous fat slug trails from front to back. It also has some nice white wheels. Aside from that this car had done about 48,000 kilometres and was going for a price I couldn’t refuse: $15,990. The only problem was that it was coming up to Christmas (the weekend before) and the car was in Sydney. I had organised the loan the week before so the cash was sitting in my bank account ready to go. I just had to organise the purchase. It was an experience in quick-thinking logistics to sortthe flight, accomodation, legal papers, etc etc.

I had my aunt and uncle living in Sydney inspect the car for me and they gave me the thumbs-up, so it was ‘all systems go’ on the plan. Carly and I flew down to Sydney on the Saturday afternoon (5PM flight) and were picked up by the seller in the car from the airport. We drove back to his house and did all the paperwork and exchanged the cash (he wanted cash to buy a replacement car the next day), went to his parents place to pick up the stock wheels and tyres, and everything was a done deal by around 8PM that evening. We waited on the road side while I waited on the phone for the insurance to be instated and away we went.

We stopped off at Carly’s sisters place in Mona Vale for a visit, then drove on to Newcastle. We arrived in Newcastle around 2AM and stayed the night, then took the inland route to Brisbane through Glen Ines etc. We arrived home at around 7.30PM that evening and were well-pleased with our accomplishments! The car performed brilliantly for the journey and never skipped a beat. Although the low-profile tyres and sports suspension sometimes proved to be uncomfortable over the old country roads, the journey was otherwise comfortable and stress-free.

I am now thinking about what extra bits and bobs I can buy for it. I am not sure if I want to modify anything; cars are a more huge money hole than any hobby I’ve had before. I am looking though at getting a cat-back exhaust, or perhaps a full system including extractors, as well as a cold air intake. That’ll be about it though for performance mods as I don’t want to put the car too far out of spec. for the purposes of keeping it drivable for the long term. Cosmetic mods I’m considering are replacing the LEDs on the dashboard from green to white, upgrading the stereo, and maybe replacing the exterior plastics with carbon-fibre look-alikes. Not because I like the look of carbon fibre, but because they’re darker in colour and enameled, so they should last longer.

Another cool toy which I am thinking about getting is a Bluetooth ODB plugin. It connects to the diagnostic computer interface of the car and then you can pair it to your phone. With the aid of an app (Android or iOS), you can get real-time readouts of all the critical system parameters. Considering this requires zero modifications and costs around a hundred bucks, although it’s probably useless it’s still pretty freakin’ cool.

I enjoy using small and light laptops because I believe this type of machine properly fits the purpose of a laptop. Anything larger than 14 inches diagonal screen size and the corresponding laptop body will no longer fit on the average lap. The term ‘desktop replacements’ seems like an oxymoron to me; what’s the point of a laptop that lives 90% of its life on a desk, tethered to power because the battery only lasts two hours?

Anyway, enough proselytizing. This post is about my new laptop which I have become enamored with, to say the least.

As you can see the shape of the system bears a striking resemblance to that of the MacBook Air. However, the main difference is that the Apple offering is less industrial-looking. The Air has a matte finish to its brushed aluminium lid whereas the Zenbook has a more polished look.

Inside the colour is more ‘gunmetal grey’ (one of my favorite colours) than the more silver-looking aluminium of Apple products.

The laptop weighs just over a kilogram and measures just 18 millimetres at its thickest point. Connectivity consists of a USB2, a USB3, SD/MMC card slot, headphone/microphone in/out, micro-HDMI and mini-VGA. The top of the range version sports an Intel Core i7 2677M, 4Gb DDR3, 256Gb SSD, 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. Battery life as tested by Engadget is approximately 8 hours with WiFi enabled.

I have installed Windows 7 Home Premium on mine and it is very nice to use. I intend upon replacing my Lenovo T410 work-provided laptop with my Zenbook. Fortunately my employer is very big on the current trend of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ whereby most of the corporate software stack can be accessed through Citrix XenApp. In terms of functionality it’s basically X window forwarding except it works on all operating systems (sidenote: checking my e-mail in Microsoft Outlook on my Google Android handset is probably one of the most ‘haha, this is so dumb but cool’ technology exercises I have recently undertaken).

At first I tried to use Ubuntu 11.10 on this system. It worked OK but wasn’t suitable for use as a full-time work laptop replacement because of the various issues leading me to doubt the reliability of the system as a whole. As mentioned there are a few issues with Ubuntu 11.10 currently:

• Can’t easily suspend/hibernate: requires tweaking with a custom powerdown script which I can’t get working, although reportedly it does work fine.
• Bluetooth support not available until kernel 3.2.
• Some models have a ‘Sentelic’ touchpad, which is not supported by any drivers at present for multi-touch etc. Other models have an ‘Elantech’ touchpad which is fully supported. You can’t tell which you’re buying until you open it up. I have a ‘Sentelic’ model.
• Currently power consumption on all Sandy Bridge CPUs is poor with kernel 3.0.x and 3.1.x; reportedly fixed in 3.2.x though currently there are workarounds which make the system somewhat unstable.

Unfortunately the lack of Bluetooth and poor touchpad support is a killer. In the office it’s not such a big deal but while I am out on site and needing to connect a USB-to-serial adapter to access the console of networking devices, I can choose to either have a mouse plugged in or my phone or the provided USB-to-Ethernet adapter. When working away from the office on unfamiliar network equipment, it’s typically essential to have at least a console and ethernet or console and mouse.

The performance of the system is very good. This is the first computer I have owned with a solid state drive and I am impressed. I have seen other computers with them but never really used them for an extended period of time to really appreciate how fast an SSD can do things. Now whenever I am using any other computer it seems like I am waiting for far too long for anything to happen.

With Windows the battery life is pretty good. Windows usually reports about 7 hours of life from a full charge, though I have never used the laptop continuously for that long on battery, I have seen a solid five hours out of it with two overnights periods of sleep. This may not be optimal, because I have installed Windows from scratch I can’t install most of the Asus utilities, including the “Instant-On” utility which I presume provides some power saving mechanism.

As compared to my last laptop; well, this one doesn’t compare. It is simply better in every way. Even the integrated graphics are better than the old nVidia graphics chip in my Dell. I experimented by playing Grand Theft Auto III on this laptop and it ran quite well.

The price I paid worked out to be around $1760 from a local retailer. They included a free Bluetooth mouse for some reason which I was quite happy with. Unfortunately for me and my insistence on buying the best version of this laptop I possibly could, paying that price meant I missed on on buying the next model down for around $660 cheaper – an i5 / 128Gb SSD model, which can be had on special at JB HiFi. It’s worth it though. With 256Gb I don’t really have to think about what I put on my system. I just know it’ll all fit.

• ADSL sync started dropping out; line would stay up for between five minutes and two hours though it was seemingly random and always different. It might drop out three times in a row with ten minutes in between and then stay up for two hours. Only to drop out again every fifteen minutes twice in a row, etc. Most of the time it would reconnect at sane speeds, above 5Mbit, but you’d also often get less than 1.5Mbit and essentially the internet was unusable. Typically we sync. at around 11-13Mbit, so even a 5Mbit line speed was pretty shitty.
• During the first week it was a call every other day to iiNet for them to get me to change some random settings on our modem or to try another modem. After three different modems and three different line filters, we decide the problem definitely isn’t on our end.
• It took about a week after our first complaint for iiNet to decide to send someone out. This they did extremely poorly. Our service is under the original owners name (my housemates mother) who is currently living overseas. So the iiNet call centre staff would ask us the best contact point and I would give them my brothers’ name and phone number. Of course, the guy doing the callout never got this information for whatever reason, so our first visit was delayed due to them calling the wrong number and being unable to organise a time to visit – or anything at all – on account of that numbers’ owner being overseas.
• The first guy to visit does some basic testing on the line. His equipment looks like it is straight from a 1980s science-fiction show. Basically all he did was test the voltage, amperage and such on the line, which was normal. He then poked around out the front of the premises where the line comes in from the street. I had never seen this before so was rather annoyed to learn that our cable entry point was actually a twist-tied cable join covered in electrical tape. Still, this line had been fine for ages so I guess that was “good enough”. The guy visiting just cut back the cable to remove any oxidization on the exposed copper and then re-twisted and re-taped it, declaring “problem solved” and the issue fixed.
• This didn’t fix the problem. We still had the same random dropouts and line speed issue. Again iiNet organised a tech to come out, this time a proper Telstra technician. Apparently he was to make changes at the exchange and investigate at our house. Again he was given the wrong number by iiNet and again his visit was delayed by this.
• So up to now about two and a half weeks have passed with no resolution of the problem. This entire time we had been unable to do much of anything online on account of these dropouts and random line speeds.
• Telstra guy shows up and does his work, we are told the problem will be fixed by close of business that day, 7PM. So we wait until 7PM and tentatively fire up all our data-hungry games, video-on-demand etc, and are surprised that we’ve managed to stay online for about five hours or so. Cool.
• Until the day afterwards. Another Telstra technician (or maybe the same one), unbeknown to myself or my brother, shows up. He is let in by family staying temporarily with us and does further work on the line. This time however, he leaves behind a completely non-functioning line. When I arrive at home late in the afternoon to discover that not only do we not have ADSL line synchronisation, but in fact we do not have a dial tone or any kind of service at all, I am completely dumbfounded. They had literally just undone everything we’d been waiting for for the last three weeks. As I write this, the next day, our service is still offline.

What the fuck? I work in this industry. How can anyone fuck up so badly and still be a dominant market force? Oh sorry I forgot, it’s Telstra. I called iiNet to lodge this latest fault – the support guy sounded genuinely surprised – and at the same time had a whinge at them about their poor handling of this whole fiasco. The support tech. was pretty helpful and after I had my little rant to him he apologised to me. I explained to him that I meant no offense, but his apology meant nothing to me as it was obviously not his personal responsibility. I preempted what I thought would be typical blame-game responses by reinforcing the concept of the service contract existing between myself and iiNet, and while yes Telstra had fucked up on this occasion and not iiNet, it was iiNet who I was paying for a service and whatever dealings they had with Telstra behind the scenes were not my concern. I asked if I could be given a one month credit and he agreed to put me through to the billing department for that.

The guy in billing was also quite helpful but at first he told me his supervisor would only give us a three week credit because that was the length of the fault time. I responded by saying to him that at this very moment, our service was still not fixed, so should I wait for it to still not be fixed in a weeks’ time and call back then? He said that he hadn’t thought of it like that and then asked his supervisor again, and I was given a one month credit.

At this point in time, if our line is fixed today and the credit goes through without problems I will be once again happy-with-but-cautious-of-recommending iiNet to anyone else. If the service isn’t fixed today, without some plausible excuse as to why, I will have to seriously reconsider my subscription to iiNet.

To pull this all back to the title of this post, the way the NBN works would mean that more companies than Telstra alone could have been called in to investigate the fault initially, thereby reducing our chance of extended downtime.

I will keep a running time line so as to fully illustrate the amount of complete and total fuck-headdery involved in using a fucking gaming console.

• 10 minutes spent initially to attach my Windows Live ID (my Hotmail) to my Xbox Live account, and attempting to add my Visa debit card
• 5 minutes spent going back to add another card, this time a Mastercard debit card
• 5 minutes spent going back to add yet another card, this time a Mastercard credit card
• Bearing in mind the above took so fucking long because I actually use a proper password which is RIDICULOUSLY LABORIOUS TO TYPE ON THE XBOX WITH A CONTROLLER AND THE ON-SCREEN KEYBOARD
• 10 minutes spent writing an angry post on a forum asking what the fuck is wrong with this fucking shit
• 15 fucking minutes spent on hold to Microsoft Xbox support to attempt to ask them what the fuck is wrong with this fucking shit. I didn’t get an answer because after this time I WAS STILL ON FUCKING HOLD
• 5 minutes spent creating an entirely new Hotmail account to link to my Xbox Live account, just in case my old Hotmail account from 2001 has some hidden bugs or some shit in it (hey, it’s Microsoft we’re talking, who the fuck knows how their Frankenstein systems work?)
• 5 minutes spent logging into the Xbox Live website (ALERT ALERT ALERT FATAL MISTAKE OMG YOU FUCKED UP BAD HERE OWEN)
• 10 minutes spent attempting to assign my new Hotmail account to my old Xbox Live account. At this point I am told that I can’t do this because this Hotmail account is already associated with an Xbox Live account. Recall just a moment ago I logged into the Xbox Live website. Yeah, that means I’ve created another Xbox Live account.

So far, including writing this post, I have spent over ONE HOUR of my time just trying to SPEND SOME MONEY. Now I am really confused because I have no fucking clue what to do. I can’t swap my Hotmail accounts between Xbox Live accounts because my Xbox won’t let me unlink my old Hotmail account. Yeah, it says on the support page that you can do it, but on my Xbox the option is simply greyed out with no explanation as to why. Typical shitty Microsoft UI design.

This is becoming exceedingly frustrating. I am just trying to spend some fucking money to buy some fucking songs for Guitar Hero (which will be censored anyway, I don’t even get the full songs, but that’s another argument for another day), and it’s so far taken me over an hour to accomplish ABSOLUTELY-FUCKING-NOTHING!

Have you ever tried to navigate the Xbox Live website? Let me tell you, IT FUCKING SUCKS! You can create things and sign into things, but you can’t delete things and you can’t log out of things. When I log into my new Xbox Live account, the one that is totally empty and serves no purpose at all and was in fact created by accident, there is NO WAY TO UNLINK the new Hotmail account I created. None. Nowhere. Ever. At this point in time it looks as though I’ll have to create YET ANOTHER Hotmail account, which is going to SUCK because I just used up my full name @hotmail.com on the NOW USELESS account I created! Awesome!