The Wonderful (or not so wonderful) life of Greg

Good evening from the comfort of the couch! Well what a busy few days it’s been. Between having servers go up in a blaze of glory and fighting with HP, I’ve thrown a trip interstate into it all.

I’ve been up to Albury this week and that always takes it’s toll. It’s a fairly boring drive, so thank god for for iPods and things like this…..

I have driven past this road so many times, and every time, it cracks me up, so I had to put the new digital camera to use while flying past at 110KM/h

Imagine having to order a pizza……

You: Hi can I order a pizza please.
Pizza Shop: Yeah sure, what can I get you?
You: I’ll have a large super special, garlic bread and a 1.25 Coke
Pizza Shop: No worries, thats $19.95, What’s your address…
You: It’s Carraragarmungee Rd…..
Pizza Shop: Can you spell that for me…
You: Well… C A R R A R…. shit where was I up to. No sorry, I can’t spell it!

So, it has to win the award so far for the longest street sign I’ve seen before, and a damn funny name to top it all off

The things things that amuse you when you’re driving!

So while up in Albury, I popped into see Andy & Belinda, and new born Makya and we went out for dinner to Hogs Breath. I was in some serious need of some red meat!

Isn’t he just sooooooo cute!

So that’s about it for the last few days. Tomorrow is another busy one, fully booked which is good and Saturday in at St John.

G

Back by popular demand, Microsoft is offering a special deal to all current registered Tafe & Uni Students for a heavily discounted copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate.

So, what’s the special?

OK - for $75, you get a copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 or for $25 you can have a 1 Year License of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007.

The conditions are that you are a current Uni or Tafe Student in Australia, and have to use your Uni or Tafe email address to sign up for it.

A great way to save over $500 on a copy of Office!

To get it, Click Here!

Cheers,

Greg

Well today I took the plunge and ordered myself a new digital camera.

For ages I’ve had my DSLR, and love it to bits, but it’s just not practical to lug everywhere, especially on the motorbike. So, I wanted something small, compact, and have read good reviews about the Canon Ixus range, so nabbed a new Ixus 75.

So the blog entries might be a bit more interesting now with some photos, and I might even setup a photo gallery to put all the happy snaps in

Well, the weekend has certainly been nice and cruisy. Saturday didn’t get up to much, just kicked around home for the morning, in the afternoon popped in to Deb & Dave and had an Australia Day BBQ with some of the Netrider crew. Sunday had a goooooood sleep in, and then over to Kent’s place to celebrate his 50th which was a nice night and a good chance to catch up with a few people and have a good feed

This week, well it’s going to be one of those weeks! Tomorrow will be a bit of chaotic day, being that it will be Tuesday after a long weekend. Wednesday at this stage up to Albury for hopefully only 1 day, and then Friday at this stage am planning to go to Sydney, but I don’t think that it will happen as the week is looking pretty busy as it is.

I am amazed how quickly this year is going! Already at the end of January, and looking at the diary, it is filling up at a great rate of knots.

Between Work, Scouts, St John and everything else, it doesn’t leave much time in the day!

Well that’s about all from me, hope you’re enjoying the more frequent blogging. I have broken the blog into a few different categories now to make it a little easier to follow.

• Life of Greg - Personal Blog Entries
• Moosique - Stuff that is music related
• Tech.Blog - Technical Articles / IT / Electronics etc
• Phunny Stuff - I think this one speaks for itself!
• Soapbox - When I want to have a good whinge!

Don’t forget, if you’ve got something to say on one of my entries then make a comment! Just follow the steps and voice your opinion or thoughts, questions, queries, moans, groans, complains or comments and it will be posted

So there you go, I guess that brings you up to date with most things for now.

G

Ok, well with the launch of the MacBook Air two weeks ago now, it is becoming more and more apparent what people really wanted out of the MacBook Air, such as myself.

So, here it is, the new MacBook AirCraft. The size of a small briefcase, and only weighs 8kg! Battery life of 38 minutes, but you’ve got everything you need!

• 3 USB 2.0 Ports
• 3 Firewire 400 Ports
• 2 Firewire 800 Ports
• DVI Output
• Ethernet
• Optical Drive
• Floppy Drive…… AND!!!!!
• An iPod Shuffle right in the side!

Now this is one serious piece of hardware that I’d consider buying!

G

With Apple releasing it’s Time Capsule in the next few months, it had me a thinking, Time Capsule is just a NAS so surely it already supports other NAS devices.

Opened it up, but no, doesn’t see other devices, only External USB/Firewire drives or Second Partitions. Bugger….

Well, use the most powerful tool in the free world, Google, and voila, we have a working Linksys NAS200 as my Time Machine drive

Simply open Terminal, and paste the following line of code in:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Open up Time Machine, and now you can use any NAS for your Time Machine backup

So, we’ll see how we go, hopefully this will provide a good ongoing backup of my MacBook and iMac. After loosing the hard drive suddenly on my MacBook a few weeks ago, this is a cool way to keep a constant backup and a quick restore mechanism for when you have to suddenly wack another hard drive in.

Just saved buying a Time Capsule

Greg

Well, what a mammoth of a temperature I had yesterday! I think I’ve manage to shake it a bit today, but still feeling pretty ordinary.

God only knows where this one came from. Haven’t been sick since the food poisoning about 10 months ago, and this has just knocked me for 6!

Monday was feeling Okish, Monday night hit a brick wall, and Tuesday was a complete write off! Spent the whole day in bed, and up this morning to wash the sheets to try and keep everything germ free and shake this thing!

I think my clients thought it was pretty funny that me of all people had lost their voice! Not a nice feeling at all.

What’s on the cards for the rest of the day? Will try get up to the chemist, need to get some more Neurofen, might sleep some more and try shake this thing, and other than that, sweet f all.

Can’t afford to be sick for the rest of the week, too much to do and not enough time to do it!

G

Well, hopefully, I’ve put an end or at least reduced the amount of comment spam I get on this blog.

In the last month I’ve been getting over 1000 comments a day that are spam and boy it drives you nuts!

So tonight I have spent about 4 hours upgrading the blog to the latest version, sorting out a few security issues that I didn’t like and got Recaptcha working.

What is Recaptcha?
Well this is what I thought was cool. There is a project running to Scan and OCR all these old books. Out of all these old books, there are words that the big scanners can’t recognise, so, it flags them and puts an image of them into the Recaptcha database.

So, you go and fill out a comment now, and you are presented with 2 words, you type them in as you see them and not only can you post a comment, but you’re actually helping the project by solving words that the scanners couldn’t solve.

So, how does this reduce spam?
Well, Bots (Big automated computers out there to seek and destroy!), scour the internet and look for forms, when they find one, they try and fill it out with comment spam. Viagra, Penis Enlargements, that sort of stuff.

So, we use a Captcha to add a human element, something that computers will find harder to read, and usually will fend them off and prevent them from submitting the form!

Cool Ha! Well, I think so, as it’s going to save me deleting shit loads of spam…. well I hope so.

Cheers,

G

Well, not even a week after the MacBook Air was released, the first of the MacBook Air Parody ads had surfaced on popular video website YouTube.

There has been much talk on a lot of the forums about the new laptop, and it seems that people were expecting a hell of a lot more out of Apple’s new laptop.

Personally, now that I’ve had a good look at it, and factored how I would use it in my everyday work life, the laptop is really quite useless to tell you the truth.

The things that it’s lacking…

• Ethernet Port
• USB Ports
• Optical Drive
• Large Hard Drive
• Lack of upgradeability (Ram & Hard Drive)

To me, those are things that I need out of a laptop every day of the week. Ok, sure, it’s small and ultra portable, and certainly serves a purpose, just not mine…..

When you look at it, Toshiba did the same thing many years ago with the ultra portable 13″ laptops, and once again, you paid a premium for the device, and then had to spend about the same on docking ports and accessories.

For the business traveller who just needs a laptop to do Word, Excel, Email etc, I see that this laptop is ideal, but really, for the traveling photographer, video editor, podcaster, or tech like me, some things just can’t go without.

It will be interesting to see what figures Apple turn out for sales in the first quarter of this new device. For now, I’ll stick to my trusty MacBook until they release a 12″ or 13″ MacBook Pro.

Greg

I pose the question…. “Is JB Hi-Fi More Addictive Than Drugs?”

Why do I ask this, well I guess that every time I go in to JB, I end up coming out with something. Much like Bunnings really.

This had me thinking, Is it an addiction?

Well most who know me know that I’m a music junkie and have always bought lots of CDs (Yes, I still prefer to own the real thing rather than buy it on iTunes) that and at least purchasing the real thing, you don’t have DRM or quality issues to worry about.

Today, I went in to JB with the intention of purchasing 1 CD, Roisin Murphy - Overpowered, which I did, but then started doing my usual strolling the isles, digging through the sin bins, just like a junkie would look every where for their last little bit of drugs to get their next hit. So, after all my digging, I walk out with Roisin Murphy, Holly Throsby, a few oldies from Dizzy Gillespie and Jose Gonzalez.

Now, tell me I’m not an addict! (K’s Choice from the mid 90’s)

So this got me thinking, what other addictions do we have in society that when you look at it, are actually more addictive than drugs?

Your Comments please

Imelda Marcos had her shoes, what’s your weakness?

Greg

Seeing that I get so much comment spam relating to penis size, masturbation, viagra, porn, hot teen lesbian nymphs and the likes, this article from Gizmodo was only too appropriate to add to the blog.

Naughty gadget maker Tenga has unveiled their “New Adult Concept” lineup of “onanism cups” that offer male users five “never before experienced sexual sensations.” Choose from the Deep Throat Cup, Soft Tube Cup, Rolling Head Cup, Air Cushion Cup, and the invigorating Double Hole Cup. The devices are disposable, and Tenga stresses that you shouldn’t be using them repeatedly by “rinsing them out.” Ha Ha…gross! The devices are available now starting at 1500 yen ($16) —Japan only (sorry horny westerners!).

Source: Gizmodo