Advogato blog for mibus

Hols

Thu, 6 Mar 2008 11:21:58 GMT

Well, it's been a while since I blogged cos I've been SO BUSY!

Anyway, tomorrow I'm taking a day off work. Monday is a public holiday, and Tuesday I'm also having off. That makes a five day weekend. I've also just finished season four of Quantum Leap today - only one season left! It's amazing seeing all these now-stars, young! For example, Terry Farrell was in the season finale.

I moved to Virgin Wireless Broadband late last year, since I can't get DSL here. (RIM! And a very old one, at that). I was initially in love with the service ($60, no line rental costs, free local and national calls, 4GB quota). Speed is OK (I frequently get 70-80kbps on downloads). Latency is a bitch (~5x to the office, compared to the DSL2+ connection I often use).

However, lately I've been getting really frustrated. Really frustrated. Random drop-outs and glitches have been getting more common. There was a two-hour one on Monday when I was trying to work from home (I gave up after one hour). Just now, we had two separate minute-long outages while Missy was trying to do an online tute / live-chat.

Anyway, off to do some stuff. Night!

Medicare ftl

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 05:10:46 GMT

OK so I was sick in July last year, and went to see a doctor. (Tonsilitis will do that to you, eventually ;-).

Got some drugs, paid the gap, went on my merry way.

Fast forward a few months, get a reminder notice from the doctor's office. Hmm, it was around when I moved, so Medicare probably has the wrong address. Called Medicare, had the address changes and the cheque resent.

I forget about it and get on with my life.

Fast forward to this week. Another reminder notice from the doctor's office. WTF?

Called the surgery. I have to call Medicare, fine, they give me the number.

Medicare says that there was never a cheque resent, but the original cheque was cashed. It's made out to the doctor, so it can't be just stolen or anything. If the surgery has any problems, they can call and arrange a trace on the cheque.

Doctor's surgery; surprised they can ask for a trace but happily agree. Call back a couple of minutes later, they can't ask for a trace - only I can.

Medicare; The first cheque was bounced (return to sender, not at this address), it was not cashed.

So, I call the surgery to let them know of the latest in governmental stupidity, and return to my life.

If only I could sign a form allowing my doctor to get direct bank transfers from Medicare on my behalf. It's stupid!!

Theta

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 02:07:08 GMT

(this entry was made on my shiny new laptop, Theta)

So far, most stuff has gone really smoothly. Ubuntu did a fantastic job of auto-detecting stuff (display, ethernet & sound, for instance). Wifi wasn't so smooth; it's a bcm43xx chipset, that currently requires a binary-blob in the driver. There's a "Restricted Drivers" thing to turn on such drivers, but even after doing that it Just Doesn't Work (TM).

Some quick searches showed people having more success with ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers, which I can attest works. So, Wifi is good! Apparently, Linux 2.6.24 will include a new driver, which will be worth testing.

Some things are still problematic - suspend doesn't work properly (but hibernation does, at least). Compiz works, but I can no longer play videos back (known problem). Both of those I'd love fixed, but both I can live without.

Files are all copied from dear old Kappa - Missy's user account Just Worked (TM) after her files were copied in. I've started a fresh profile, and am just migrating individual app's data across as I want it. The CPU blows kappa's away (even in 32-bit mode) - video playback that dropped frames on kappa due to CPU exhaustion, doesn't even use 20% CPU on Theta. (For so many reasons - SSE/SSE2/SSSE3, extra L1 cache, extra optimisations on x86...).

It's also notable for not having wild video issues, having a battery life longer than 30 minutes, and supporting WPA. Whoo!

Finally - If I didn't manage to catch up with you already this week, Merry Christmas / Happy New Year. It's a busy week when you have three children and heaps of family to see, so I can't see everyone at once :). Ciao!

Early Christmas Present

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 07:09:43 GMT

I have an early Christmas present, to myself.

Missy decided that my laptop was finally dead enough to warrant an actual replacement. (The screen no longer displays mid-range grey as grey, it's bright blue. The display also goes utterly nuts if you dare adjust the angle of the screen).

She looked for an Eee PC, but none were available. Turns out she managed to get a Compaq C710tu for under $500 (after a cashback). Sweet! I was looking forward to the 7" form-factor, and the flash-only storage, but after looking at what this machine can offer I think this beasty is more useful for the price-point. (DVD burner, for instance!).

Installation
Since I didn't have my Ubuntu CDs that Anton thoughtfully procured before the holidays (they're at work still), I headed to Kerry's.

Since I wanted to eventually pass the laptop down to Missy and re-install Windows, I had to create recovery CDs. (They're too cheap to put them in the box...). That too around two hours, which is bizarre and ridiculous.

A quick reboot later and Ubuntu was running as a Live CD. I poked the installer and quickly answered all of the questions. It wouldn't resize the NTFS partition (not that I cared that much), so I've chosen a ~70GB root ext3 partition.

One neat advantage of using a LiveCD installer is that you can use the machine (eg. play games :) during the install.

Not 30 minutes later, I have my shiny new Ubuntu laptop - tonight I'll be setting up final drivers and migrating files over to it from poor dear kappa, who has little chance for a recovery at this point.

Long Live "theta"

My Girls

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 05:12:38 GMT

It's been a busy time! We had Rachael's birthday on the weekend, even. Crazy crazy!

It's time I put some more photos up:

Rachael

Claire

Samantha

Samantha Rose Mibus

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:08:51 GMT

DSL woes

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 23:07:37 GMT

Still no DSL here. Really over it now.

Work bought me a modem; I get 28-32k. Argh @ PGS!

Telstra Just Don't Care (TM). They supply a phone service, and it's a valid business decision for them to supply me a line that can't get DSL. TIO seems to agree.

Unfortunately the current legislation only requires a low minimum data rate - something you can run a fax nicely on :-/

Trying to get voice faults fixed, hoping it'll get me off the PGS and straight on to the RIM at least. Who knows. If not, I'm probably just going to disconnect the home phone line. It's not like Missy and I don't both have mobiles!

Father's Day 2007

Wed, 5 Sep 2007 01:07:45 GMT

I had a pretty good Father's Day.

My girls kicked it off my giving me presents while I was still in bed; a copy of Loco Roco for the PSP (my first actual game!) and underwear (brightly coloured!). Rachael insisted on which pair I'd wear, too :)

Breakfast with my old man followed (he paid, double bonus!). Bacon and egg muffins FTW. Lunch was with Missy's folks, and doubled as a birthday lunch for Missy and her twin sister.

After lunch we travelled to IKEA, not exactly my idea of a "great" time, but we got a few nice things.

Dinner was home-made pizza, utterly perfect. Missy and the little ones all went to bed; I stayed up to watch Star Trek and play my new PSP game.

Great day :-)

Oh, and we're probably having a baby RSN!!!

EQ/SQ

Wed, 5 Sep 2007 01:07:45 GMT

Here are your EQ SQ results:

EQ	: 22
SQ	: 79
Brain Type	: Extreme Systemizing

What does your score mean?

Click Here to learn more.

Take the EQ SQ tests

Month of Change

Wed, 5 Sep 2007 01:07:45 GMT

(First things first...)

Congratulations Cassandra and Luke on your recent engagement. It's been a long time coming, and I hope your lives are filled with wonders and love. (and children? :)

It's been a long time - a month - since my last blog here. I've been a busy boy!

Since Matt's obviously not going to mention it first, I sold him my house :).

I'm now living in a lovely rental overlooking the Onkaparinga river and the sea (and Matt's mum's house!). It's a bit weird and inconvenient being on a slope, but otherwise I'm actually really happy with it. The lounge area is MUCH more usable.

I also have a shed, where I can hang the things that Missy doesn't want to see (like a giant photo of her :), as well as store all of my stuff.

I've also bought a PSP in prep for a change at work (that I'll probably discuss later). It's absolutely great for podcasts, video and audio. Best (only? ;) money I've spent on myself in a few years now.

It's also been a month of reflection and contemplation. Things are afoot that I hadn't put together, but slowly the world is making sense once more. Well, as much sense as a hunk of rock with seven billion ugly bags of mostly water can. (No, you're not supposed to understand this paragraph. Stop trying or you'll give yourself a headache!)

I've been a bit slack here, largely because I've been really busy, but also because I've been updating my work blog. It's not going to include home life stuff, it's purely work-related. All the same, if you're desperate enough to want to hear from me more, you can check up on me over there.

In a final and sad note, I'm as yet unable to get DSL. Costello is hammering away trying to get it for me, let's hope it happens soon! (PS. I thought I didn't have your number the other day, but it was under "D" not "C". I nearly didn't even check there!)