New Zealand

So I’m going to NZ for a couple of weeks come November. It’s basically a fly in, drive around, fly out, 2 week type arrangement. The Plan so far is to fly into Auckland, grab a car and head south stopping in various places. We’re flying out of Christchurch 2 weeks later. We have a rough itinerary but nothing is set in stone. The only thing we have so far are flights. Courtesy of VirginBlue who not only have the best times to fly but also fairly cheap prices. Flight time is only about 3.5 hours so it shouldn’t be to much of a problem flying cattle class.

Job

So it looks like I’ll be extending my contact here at “Bank” for another 3 months or so. Although I won’t be working out of the Bendigo. Part of the arrangement is that I’ll be working out of their Docklands office. I’m not sure if it will be easier but I will be once again, based in Melbourne.

The rationale of course is money and time. Although I will be mostly out of debt by the time I finish my current 6 month stint in October, I won’t have any actual cash which is problematic because I want to buy cool stuff. Being based in Melbourne will also give me the chance to find another job without actually being unemployed. Seeing as though there are no IT staff at all in the Docklands office I will be actually completely isolated. I’m not sure if that is good or bad yet. Either way, it’s only 3 months and it will carry me over Christmas and New years.

In recent news Starbucks got the arse from Australia. W00t! Score one for Australia against giant US Megacorp generic coffee franchises. Of course most news places are trying to carry this as a “bad” thing. I mean WTF? Since when did we want /more/ America here? Of course people always seem to pull the “job” argument. “Oh! But think of the 700 people who lost their jobs!”. I say Bullshit. You know what? We live in great times. Unemployment is way down and this being Australia, one of the luckiest countries in the world we have unemployment benefits. And what’s more they last forever and come with a whole host of other benefits like rent assistance and various discounts . Unlike America who are more likely to make you homeless then re-employable. Not only do they get un-employment after having nothing but an unskilled labor jobs but because they are made redundant they get paid out and they get to skip the 6 week waiting period for unemployment benefits. That’s of course assuming that most of the employees weren’t minors, which they probably were. And what exactly did Starbucks with it’s millions of dollars provide these employees? How about minimum wage and minimum training. So all in all, Screw you Starbucks. We don’t want your rubbish generic consumer brand.

The IBM X300.

I’ve waited a few days to post regrading the new addition. I have to say that it is indeed a mighty fine laptop. It is indeed light, In fact it feels more like an empty shell of a laptop then a real one. The screen is great and like all IBM laptops, the keyboard kicks arse.

I’m not so sure about the having both a nipple and a track pad on the one device. Sure, it helps to meet all peoples needs but due to the fact there are two sets of buttons the track pad is squished in height. I think you should choose one or the other and run with it. It feels redundant to have two things that do the exact same thing. I’m not sure how i feel about using the nipple yet but I have noticed it help you type faster as you don’t have to take your hands away from the keyboard to mouse. Wonder if that makes up for the loss of speed from using a track pad…

I am a bit pissed that the place where i bought it from “Notebooks R us“(where my last one came from) conveniently forgot to add my extra RAM to my order and seemingly also conveniently didn’t know that the battery that comes with it is a wasn’t the 6 cell one. I thought it would be clear that when someone asks for a laptop with more RAM and a different battery that you actually have to add both the RAM and the battery. Either that or by conveniently forgetting these things and hoping the purchaser is to stupid/ignorant they make enough to warrant pissing people off. They even shaft you because my receipt doesn’t specify either of these two things. I should really check these things before I take delivery but I was in a hurry and I have on email that both are included in the price so, you know, whatever. He is going to get back to me regarding both of these items, In fact now that I think about it, he was meant to call me today.

I chose to run with Debian testing(Lenny) as my first OS. It came with some sort of other OS(something about views?) but I didn’t really feel like a long drawn out “Welcome to Shit, Please Activate your Shit, Now update your Shit for 10 hours, and shit it’s still slow and shit”.

Debian has come along way from when I last used it(Debian Stale that is). So far it’s just like I remember it though. Pure. Debian is an idealist Linux. It doesn’t have whats best for the users at heart. It’s more about being Free and Pure. I think I like that about it. I mean I don’t like Ubuntu because it assumes to much, caters to the lowest common denominator dropkick windows user. Fedora is similar although they are trying to be “Were all enterprise and shit, but could you test or shit for us?”. Debian feels like it is about the hardcore Linux shit. I’m not sure what their official motto is, but it should be something like “You should know that shit already”.

It uses Iceweasel and Icedove instead of Firefox and Thunderbird because although free are not Free. And if you don’t think it’s important to fork things when they start to become to propriety, ever hear of ssh? How about openssh? Which one is the most used *nix app? Openssl ring any bells out there? It also does cool stuff like make it easy to roll your own kernel which if you have ever tried to do with Fedora is a world of pain. It also must be nearly the only Linux disto left that uses LILO instead of grub. And you know what? LILO is probably better although not from the end-loser friendly or pretty splash point of view but from a technical, it always works one.

So for the moment I’m sold on Debian.

SSD. Kicks all sorts of arse. I had my doubts on the whether or not SSDs were going to be the NBT in HD technology. All I have to say now is once you go Solid State, you never go back. You can bitch and moan about mechanical drive throughput and MTBF values. But when it comes to having a seek time of 1 ms. You notice the difference. Boot time is more then 50% faster and S2D is not something you need to book an appointment for anymore. SSD technology is totally the future. Once they get the size thing sorted out, you can kiss your platters goodbye.

In other news, not much really.

I have a pair of Logitech Freepulse Bluetooth wireless headphones. Now the problem with wireless is that you need to charge them. If per chance you forget, no tunes. But of course you only ever forget to charge them when you really really really need them. Like when the people around are annoying the living hell out of you with their pointless useless conversation drivel.

What I think I really need is a pair of wireless headphones with a headphone jack in it. So you know, you can go wired or wireless. Now that would be cool. But does it exsist? No of course not.

So with the death of my beloved NEC Versa I need a new laptop. After a short shop around. I ended up at an IBM(Lenovo) X300. Now, this laptop is far from the cheapest laptop around is in a new category of laptops. It’s ultra-portable. This of course doesn’t really mean that much, it just means that it’s light, slim and doesn’t have a moving hardrive. I like to think it’s pretty kick-arse, but I have to think that, I’m about to own one.

Of course on the day I order my new X300, Lonovo announces a new range of laptops, a cheaper X200 and a whole score of new Centrino2 based options. That’s not to mention the whole new range of laptops released by every other vendor. But because I’m currently without a laptop and I /need/ a new laptop /now/ I would not of been able to wait for them to make it to our shores anyway. It’s still annoying though when you know your new toy is about to go down in price, almost immediately after you’ve bought it. Oh well, such is life. I get my new fully spec’d laptop on Saturday, 64GB SSD, 4GB RAM, 6 Cell Batt, Bluetooth 2+. I smell a fresh “Make it work with Linux” challenge coming on…