Welcome to the iGeneration April 26, 2011
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Well – I suppose it had to happen sometime… we finally succumbed and joined the iRevolution!!! We’ve been looking at perhaps buying an iPad2 since last month, however stock here in Sydney is terrible and I’ve been worried about the toddler breaking it. For the long Easter weekend, The Good Guys were offering the 4th gen iPod Touch for $199. Using the ad and the stock check at our local store we then took it to Officeworks (literally round the corner from us) and got a brilliant price match whereby getting it for 5% less than that, approx. $190 which ain’t bad when most places are selling at 230-250 range. When my aunty came to stay last month she brought her iPhone and our 2yr old Evie was enamoured with playing game apps on it. So we thought, well we are going to have a lot of flights and transit and road trips when we go back to visit the UK so we’ll need something to entertain her so we opted for the iPod Touch which is pretty much like an iPhone except you don’t have mobile phone access. Not a problem for us as we have wifi and you also benefit from not having the ongoing contract charges. Officially the iPod Touch is mine, but Evie keeps hijacking it now. I found loads of brilliant toddler learning game apps (as well as plenty of other not so educational ones) that Evie likes playing. Evie really is of the iGeneration – I can’t believe a 2 yr old can pick up the technology so quickly. She can do everything on it, picking the games she wants to play, navigating about. The only thing stopping her doing more is the fact I have password/PIN protected it to stop her downloading more apps. I’m using it mostly for quick checks of email/facebook etc as well as playing quick word games. I also like iBooks as I can usually find something to read when I get a bit of peace (that should be “IF” not “when” when Evie is around). The other brilliant thing is I can use Skype on it too (or Facetime if I am talking to my sis on her iPad/iPhone) which is very useful when chasing Evie around trying to get her to talk to my relatives back in England!
POLi – Piece of Laziness, more like POXi January 31, 2011
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Great- I’m all riled up and can’t get to sleep with stress. Tonight I decided to go ahead and book some flights with jetstar.com for our friend Miyuki’s wedding in June. There’s a bit of sale on so thought I’d get in well in advance so I don’t have to worry about stuff later on. Ok, picked flights and navigated my way through all the tick boxes trying to peddle me more extras. Got to payment… hmm it’s gonna cost $50 to pay by credit card, stuff that, I’ll try out the POLi system. It basically links to your online banking (sounds v dodgy) and then prepopulates the transfer details into the boxes. Then come the BIG problems….
1. POLi (or I’d like to call it POXi) doesn’t work with anything but Windows crap. So I have to reboot my laptop into the alternative “must-be-desperate” OS called Vista and wait 15 mins for that to warm itself up such that I can get onto the internet again
2. POXi needs to be installed. Another 10 mins waiting for the box to appear that asks me to “run” the application
3. POXi finally installed (in the meantime I have been to the toilet twice… yes I have filled and emptied my bladder 2x faster than POLi takes to install
4. Select your bank… another 5 mins of waiting… well actually it was 2 mins until my bank login screen appeared and another 3 mins waiting for POXi to let me actually type in it
5. Go thru the usual rigmaroles of a bank transfer except each page takes 2 mins before POXi lets me type into any boxes/press any buttons
6. Finally get to the payment confirmation stage… thank goodness almost done. But wait I need to wait for an SMS from my bank now
7. OK it’s done. The payment sent page has appeared. OK now to print it out. Suddenly POXi has sprung to life and it’s only let me look at the payment sent page for 10 seconds before it all closes up
8. Crap crap crap crap. I have definitely sent payment. But now where is that confirmation POXi promised me. Instead it tells me I have an error where POXi has timed out (cos it takes so frigging long to do stuff) and my payment cannot proceed. SHUT UP… cannot proceed, then where has my money gone???
9. Now I have to ring jetstar on the one and only phone number (there is no email or any other form of contact). 50 mins on hold and someone finally picks up. Yes they have a record of our reservation number and the flights. Tell her we have paid but POLi is playing up. She says she has to check with her manager and before we can say “NOOOOO” she’s put us on hold. 5 mins later she hangs up on us. So infuriating. I know jetstar is budget flights but surely if you pay for something you actually expect to get it??
So now I’m all worried about X,Y,Z. Thank goodness there are another 4-5 months to sort this out. So I hope tomorrow I will finally be able to get it sorted out.
Soniq QPi600B DVD Player June 23, 2009
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Television.Tags: soniq QPi600b
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So, our 11 month old has shown us her supreme technology skills by knackering up our old Wharfdale DVD player (it was brought over from the UK and had a DVD recorder and freeview integrated – but neither were useful in Oz anyway). She’s obviously seen those testing machines at Ikea and decided to repetitively test the drawer open/close mechanism. So hubby popped to JB Hifi in search of something fairly el cheapo off-the-shelf with the best specs he could find 
We ended up with the Soniq QPI600B DVD player at just a smidge over $80. It has HDMI and also a nifty iPod dock that pops out at the front (hmm not sure this is a good feature or not with the “DVD Destructo” around). Annoyingly the DVD was locked to region 4 – rubbish if all your DVDs are UK region 2!! Hubby couldn’t find a hack online for unlocking it and was going to take it back to the shop. I however said let’s just try a few off the internet, and yay, one of them worked. So if you’ve bought one that needs to be unlocked here’s the instructions:
Switch on the unit
Open tray
Press 5168
Change the region code to “Test 0″
Exit
Hubby is delighted as now he can watch his Sharpe DVD marathon!!
Advent K300 Review August 2, 2008
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General.Tags: advent K300 review
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Well, what with all the commotion of Baby Evie arriving I’ve not had the time to do a blog entry about hubby’s new laptop. Sadly the news is not good. Essentially we’re sending it back to be refurbished yet again! It wasn’t a bad spec for the price but was useless for my hubby to use. He wanted to use it running linux (Ubuntu) but unfortunately, the way the DSG Group (Dixons/PC World/Currys) set up their computers means that some of the advanced options are disabled on the BIOS and hence only some of the functionality is working in Ubuntu (according to hubby’s random geek rants it’s eomething to do with the power management). [More details on Ubuntu Forum here for other geeks]
In terms of styling and other things, it is fairly chunky but was quite robust looking also it has higher feet so doesn’t tend to get as hot underneath. The fan is really really loud. It does have a button to reduce power usage/fan speed but this button seemed to do nothing at all. I quite liked the interchangable front covers (more of a kiddy thing but still fun for about 5 mins).
Indulging My Inner Geek April 28, 2008
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Musings.Tags: personal websites
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Started rewriting my personal website last night and continued this morning before work (v naughty – didn’t get in till after 10am). I think I wrote my first website back in 2000. I don’t think my programming skills have improved much but I am getting better at doing the graphics. It’s not that I don’t have the skills, but I just haven’t had to program anything for so long I can’t even remember how to start (hang my head in shame)!! My personal website was created in 2003, originally hosted on brinkster (cos it was free) and last updated in 2005 – hmm a bit out of date as it didn’t even contain stuff about our furry baby Mocha or the wedding! Also it had… shock horreur… frames. It’s funny how things go in and out of fashion. When I was first learning about websites frames were very de rigeur, now they are shunned by almost everyone. We have our own server at home now so I can load things up nice and quickly and if it breaks hubby will go hit it with a hammer (the official Physicist’s solution) I would prob Ctrl+Alt+Del and reboot.
Summary of the day: Played with my website, Went to work, Printed out a whole tree’s worth of handouts (I have a lecture to give to 40 students tomoz), Caught up with emails, Lugged all the stuff home, Made an “interesting” potato gratin (somehow it baked for an hr and the potatoes were still a bit raw), Played with website again (doing the boring bit with all the photo galleries).
10 Blog Statistics January 10, 2008
Posted by graciek in 10 Things..., Computing.Tags: Blog Stats
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This week’s 10 things are random statistics from my blog (as of today).
1. 133 Posts
2. 24 Comments
3. 18 Spam Comments
4. 234 Hits on 25/09
5. 2 Days with No Posts
6. 19 Categories
7. 165 Tags
8. 700 Hits on One Page
9. 178 Word Average per Post
10. 13 Ping Backs
Summary of the day: Work again, Analysed questionnaires, Created summary presentation, Made Cassoulet for dinner
Wii-ing Myself November 23, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Parties.Tags: dinner party, wii
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We bought our Nintendo Wii back in June. At the time I found one in Argos and they had an offer where you got £10 off Wii Play (which included another wiimote) think it was about £205 for the console, Play and Sports. We don’t seem to play it as much these days but it’s great when we have people over. We have a small selection of games (Sport, Play, Harry Potter OOTP, Far Cry, Wario Smooth Moves , and hopefully The Simpsons for Christmas). Wii Sport kept my parents occupied (mostly the golf game).
Strange how there seems to be a big rush for Wiis in the runup to Christmas. They haven’t been overly plentiful in stock over the year, but they weren’t hard to find over the summer. If we hadn’t got one, I would prob have held out for the next version of Wii (think it’s coming out some time next year) which plays DVDs as well.
Summary of the day: Work, 2 student meetings, Catching up with emails, Extremely large fish (with some chips and bean juice – I like the baked bean sauce but not the actual beans), Supermarket shopping for last minute stuff, Had a dinner party with steamboat, Played trivial pursuits (I won – w00t) and then Mario Smooth Moves (v surreal graphics).
Addicted to Facebook October 12, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Musings, Under the Weather.Tags: facebook addiction
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I think I am actually addicted to Facebook (signed up in Feb this year and it’s slowly built into a full blown addiction). Even though I know that nothing has happened (i.e. I have no emails notifying me) I still find myself checking it whenever I’m bored (which today was about 10 times as I was off sick from work). So, what is this addiction and why? Is it really because I just can’t wait to see if someone has been bothered to do something, or could it be that I just want to see if I actually have any friends to validate my social networking skills? Eventually I’m sure I will get bored of it or get invited one too many times to become a vampire/werewolf/pirate/ninja/whatever. What’s with all the poking too? First there was normal poking (soon got bored, but still end up poking people back once in a while), there’s also superpoke (the more you poke, the more types of poke you get with little piccies), then there are a whole load of other X me, Super X me, Superduper X me Pro type ones where you can do virtually anything to anyone. Then there’s also those gift type ones (where you give other people things; plants, stars, fish, eggs, etc) which annoy me as I don’t really want to clutter up the profile with them, yet every week I seem to get something really random or other (always seemingly from a relative for some reason).
So, what I’d really like to know is are there certain psychological profiles/categories of people based on the types of applications/usage of facebook? Wouldn’t that be interesting, they already collect all your usage stats, an interesting social networking experiment theory there.
Summary of the day: Woke up – couldn’t speak, Stayed home from work, Made some buk poh, Slept, Played on facebook, Answered emails, Slept some more, Cried a bit (feeling miserable and ill), Cursed at students for making me ill, Ate an entire box of throat pastilles in one afternoon, Got an abstract accepted for yet another conference
Banking Woes October 3, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Money, WTF?.Tags: internet banking woes
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So I’ve been a happy internet banker for the last ten years. Randomly last week my account details weren’t being accepted (strange as I use a money manager hence know that the details entered hadn’t change). So I re-register in case it’s randomly forgotten (on 3 of my different computers). 5 days later the new details come and they don’t work either. Telephone banking doesn’t work either. Spend 30 mins on the phone this morning and can’t get through the security check (answered 5 questions, then was stumped by the last question about the month and year the account was opened – who can remember that after such a long time?). I was seriously beginning to think that my account had been hacked so went down to the bank. All they told me was that I must be entering the details in wrong, and that I have to re-register again tomorrow! Apparently when the new details come you can’t actually use them till 7 days after you register (as opposed to what it says on the letter which says it will work that day). Thankfully the accounts seem to be intact as there’s no transactions that shouldn’t be there. Phew. Had forgotten the total convenience of remote banking – how did we cope before phone and internet banking?
Summary of the day: Went to work, Had meetings, Got stressed and went to the bank, Rewrote a magazine article, Went to archery (form a bit pants, but nice to be back shooting)
Being a Door Mat September 26, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Musings, WTF?.Tags: being taken advantage of, ranting
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I’m usually a very easy going person, who will help others as much as I can. Why is it that sometimes people just take the piss and expect you to jump? I don’t often get very pissed off, but today I am feeling totally used. People expect you to go out of your way to do things for them, and you have plenty of other things to stress you out to do with your time, yet because you’re such a mug you want to help them and you make time. I don’t think people realise just how annoying it is, or perhaps they just think I have nothing better to do then to pander to their every need and wait around. Grr!!
Summary of the day: Went to work, rewrote a presentation, came home early to get software loaded onto home laptop (need to bring home laptop in for a meeting because work laptop still hasn’t been fixed since nuking itself 20 days ago), fight with Vista (it seems to think it’s acceptable to take 6hrs unzipping a 120MB file), download 7-zip instead (great bit of software and best of all free, unzip now takes all of 2 mins), blitzed house, made wontons for dinner.
