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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!

The machine is based on an Intel Atom 330 (dual-core 1.6Ghz) with 2Gb of DDR2 800Mhz RAM. It has one onboard Realtek 8168B PCIe gigabit ethernet controller (LAN side) and I have installed a VIA Rhine II 100Mbit PCI network card (PPPoE/WAN side). I have also installed a Marvell 88SE9123 PCIe SATA 6.0 Gb/s SATA controller and a Silicon Image SiI 3114 3Gb/s SATA controller for extra hard disks. The Marvell chip on the former card is the same one installed on many new motherboards which boast SATA3 support, and will be until Intel, AMD, VIA et. al. start incorporating SATA3 controllers into their chipsets, so it is already well supported and will be for some time. It is only a 2-port card but that is perfect for RAID0 or RAID1 configuration, not that I am using the fakeraid hardware controller on board.

So far the system has had several teething problems. I am using a standard Billion 7300 modem/router as a simple ADSL2+ bridge, with the ClearOS box performing PPPoE negotiation and all routing (NAT) duties. I have left my previous modem/router, a Billion 7404VGPX configured and connected to the LAN on standby duty in case I have problems with ClearOS, which I have. All I need to do is move the phone line from the Billion 7300 to the 7404 and re-enable the DHCP server on the 7404 to revert to the old setup.

The ClearOS installation procedure is fairly straightfoward although it is somewhat limited by the fact that you must install from USB or CDROM if you are setting up ClearOS in Gateway mode like I have done. You cannot do an install from the internet unless you are running standalone mode. This doesn’t really make sense to me, surely it wouldn’t be hard to specify temporary network settings during the installation procedure to gain access to the internet?

Some of the problems I have had so far with ClearOS:

• Hard locks (hardware problems): the Sil 3114 card has caused some hard system locks while accessing attached disks. Considering this card has been in use for the last 3-4 years in an older fileserver with four disks attached (it now only has two), this is either indicative of the card reaching its end of life, a problem with its physical installation or some incompatibility between this and the motherboard. The latter is highly unlikely, but the former are possible. That said, it has been working well for the entire time in a well-ventilated case and is essentially ‘good as new’, so who really knows? I have reseated the card in the PCI slot and so far the system has been operating for 25 hours straight. Still early days, but previously it’d only worked for less than that before problems arose.
• Soft locks (software problems): I have managed to lock the system two or three times by clicking around the web control panel. It seems as though running certain reports causes catastrophic failures somewhere, so much so that it ceases function as a router and does not even respond to SSH any longer, requiring a hard reset. This has not happened since I reseated the Sil 3114 card though, so maybe that was at play here.
• Random service failures: the web configuration sometimes dies and comes back. Usually after performing a CPU-intensive task, like listing the currently open connections or generating a report.
• PPPoE: doesn’t seem to receive DNS server address information from the ISP. Or if it does, it doesn’t redistribute this information via DHCP automatically. I’ve had to manually input the preferred DNS servers into the DHCP client.
• ClearOS doesn’t support transparent web proxying AND QoS bandwidth allocation. This is a well-discussed problem with ClearOS, apparently the developers think the problem is too hard to solve without more money. However, other freely-available Linux-based routers can do transparent web proxying and QoS bandwidth allocation. Guess it wasn’t too hard for them…
• Also doesn’t provide NFS services out of the box.

Aside from it crashing a few times (which is looking more and more like it was my fault), the system has been pretty good. It has most of the features anyone would need as an SMB or advanced home server.

Routing and WAN performance with routing and such is excellent. Pings to local gaming servers seem to be slightly reduced by 20-30 milliseconds. The web proxying cache seems to have sped things up a little bit, though with most of the content I access being hosted locally in Australia the speed is already there, it’s more to do with saving bandwidth on not re-downloading the same content all the time.

I still can’t figure out what the deal with network fileserving is. The CPU load while transferring files at gigabit speeds are around 80-90%; I guess this is owing to the fact that I am using an mdadm Linux software RAID0? Samba to Windows Vista only yeilds about 30Mb/sec; though FTP is 80-120 Mb/sec (given this high number is impossible, I am doubting the accuracy of these numbers). iperf between systems is about 850Mbit though so I know the network isn’t the problem. It will require further troubleshooting methinks.

A lot of peoples homes have been inundated quite comprehensively, but due to the Wivenhoe Dam upgrade that occurred from 2003 – 2005 this flood has not been as bad as it could have been. However I await the inevitable shitstorm that will follow the cleanup efforts because no doubt a lot of stupid people along with Anna Bligh’s political enemies will come out of the wood works blaming her and everyone else in order to further their own agendas.

Well, there’s the obvious things: lighting and ambience. I’ll be making use of several sets of disco lights: of what type I am as yet unsure, but I imagine they’ll be standard fare. At any rate, that kind of stuff is either simple (random) or complex (programmable); unfortunately I don’t have the equipment or the time to deal with the latter, so the former will have to do. As for ambience, I am also going to have a smoke machine running and probably set up a light-sensitive plasma ball as well.

Then, there are the not so obvious things: video and visualisations. Fortunately in this day and age of high-def YouTube, it is sometimes quite easy to obtain good quality music videos. I have a few and I’ll be putting them to good use, but being able to do so was a small effort in itself (which I’ll get to later). Visualisations are basically mathematic representations or interpretations of the music being played. You’ve probably seen one before, there are some basic ones that come with most media players. Most times you will probably see bars moving up and down or a wiggly-wavy line, these are very simple forms; then there are more elaborate interpretations such as projectM, some of which can produce quite stunning and interesting imagery.

My plan was to make use of projectM in conjunction with my home theatre PC. This would provide an excellent central place to display the visualisations and obviously as my home theatre speakers are already connected, it just makes sense. But what else? Normally in clubs and such (The Met is a great example), they have multiple screens set up doing this kind of thing … how could I do that too? Turns out, pretty easily. PulseAudio is an awesome piece of software for just this purpose. With the click of a few settings I was able to setup my HTPC as a multicasting audio server with my desktop and laptop computers receiving the multicast; now, with projectM running on all three systems, I am able to have an easy to organise multi-screen system which makes use of existing network cabling in my home. The projectM instances on each computer won’t be synchronised (unless I specify a list of presets, but there are literally thousands – maybe I will, but probably not), but I think that’s fine. If they’re all displaying different imagery it just adds to the experience in my opinion.

As for music videos, that was a little more difficult to figure out because I wasn’t aware if it was possible to do what I wanted. There were no media players that support projectM and video playback at the same time; and technically, there still isn’t, but I was able to use qmmp to achieve what I wanted. qmmp allows me to add audio and video files into the same playlist. When qmmp reaches a video title in the playlist it simply launches mplayer to handle the file. mplayer is a handy video utility: it plays pretty much everything and it’s also highly configurable; not having its own graphical front-end makes this a requirement. It was a pretty simple process of reading the mplayer man page, adding a few options to its configuration file and having it behave exactly how I want: on the HTPC television screen, projectM will be fullscreen until a movie is played, whereupon a fullscreen mplayer is launched over the top of the projectM display to play the video file which then automatically exits at the conclusion of the video, at which point the next song plays and the projectM visualisation is once again visible. Neat, huh?

So, I was able to configure qmmp, PulseAudio, projectM and mplayer in such a way that I can remotely control (via vnc, but other options seem viable) the music and video playback for my party. I’m happy!

Well, we know where all that stuff is now: long gone. With the likes of 3, Vodafone, Virgin and later Crazy Johns all jumping in on the 3G + caps bandwagon, Telstra was left behind with their decades-old poor value phone contracts (you pay $80, you get $80). I paid out my Telstra contract early and went with 3, and I’ve been there since about 2006/2007, and had two phones with them.

Recently, 3 has been puchased by Vodafone as you may have noticed. But not so recently; say, in the last six months or so, 3 has been growing steadily irrelevant. Their once great coverage (3G + 2G on Telstra) became standard. Their once great range of phones diminished over time. They got to a point where they are now: they have three or four flagship phones, but nothing else. Hell, they don’t even have the iPhone 4 yet. No ritzy midnight launch from 3.

Although 3 has been good to me, I was tired of getting drop-outs everywhere along my short journeys to and from work. 3G is slow enough already, even when browsing ‘mobile friendly’ sites, but it’s made worse when between my home station and the CBD, reception would drop completely about two or three times for several minutes at a time.

It was with much trepidation that I decided to check out other providers – Telstra initially wasn’t even on my radar as, well, we all know Telstra is shit, so why bother?

But that’s where I was wrong. It turns out that as Telstra has recently sold all of their copper-monopoly to the government they were only left with their NextG mobile network monopoly. Which, combined probably with a thousand other things behind the scenes in Telstra’s board room, has made them really think about their place in the market and where they want to move in the future. Hence, their residential broadband services are now actually good value. You can get 200Gb of data on Telstra cable at 30Mbit for around $60-$70 per month. I pay more than that for less data on much slower ADSL2+. Other mobile carriers have the new Android and iPhones on $60-$80 caps, most of the time with more included call value and data, but still with a higher entry price point than Telstra, from whom you can get the latest and greatest Android and iPhone starting at $49 per month, which is exactly what I did. They actually have a deal going at the moment where you can double your data for free – for the period of your 24 month contract. So, the included 200Mb on the $49 cap goes to 500Mb, which is alright. But what really got me was the fact that this applies throughout your contract period, even if you change your data plan! If you bump your included up to 500Mb, you actually get 1Gb, and so on.

A lot of people will tell you that in metropolitan areas, other networks are just as good as NextG for speed and coverage. Well, they’re probably correct most of the time. However, the advertisement on television you see with the apathetic girlfriend and the eBay-fanatic boyfriend is actually true, mostly. I have tested it. You really can maintain mobile reception, data connection, calls, etc, inside elevators, with NextG. I went to Townsville recently for work and took a NextG data card with me for my laptop. I was downloading at about 100-200Kb/sec on the outskirts of the city, inside a concrete building. That’s impressive. I could barely make a call on my Vodafone work mobile.

My reluctance to choose Telstra was removed – temporarily. I had a bad experience turn to a good one while attempting to sign up.

First, I went to my local Telstra store. They told me I couldn’t have the double data deal. I was confused because I was sure it had been advertised. I was right, and they were wrong. So I left a whinge about it on TEX, the Telstra Exchange blog and forgot about it. I went to another store, waited for 45 minutes to be served, and eventually signed up. I got my double data deal. However, on that day in particular Telstra were doing some upgrades, so my number couldn’t be ported then and there. This meant leaving the phone with them until the next day, as they can’t give the phone out without porting the number first due to the risk of fraud. OK, so I waited again.

It turns out the store I visited first is a “Telstra licenced” store, which basically means it’s a franchise and they do their own thing while carrying the “T[life]” branding. I thought it was pretty ridiculous because thousands of stores who franchise under hundreds of companies don’t selectively pick and choose what deals they honour or products they stock. Why is Telstra different?

I was then surprised and impressed to receive an e-mail from a Telstra customer relations manager in a followup to the little whinge I left on their blog. He wanted to know which store I had been to and whether he could get someone to call me to help me out. Frankly, I was shocked. Telstra, the same Telstra who everyone hates, has actually e-mailed me out of the blue to ask if they can help, based solely on a little rant I left on their blog. “THIS IS INCREDIBLE!” I thought, “TELSTRA ARE ACTUALLY ENGAGING WITH CUSTOMERS USING MODERN COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUES!” my unnecessarily loud and excited thought continued. Since then I have exchanged a few e-mails back and for with the fellow concerning Telstra and the phone I bought, and frankly I am really impressed.

The phone I chose is the HTC Desire, but I think I’ll write another post about that later – this one is already just over 1,000 words!