Oh, wait. There it is over on Wall Street.
Tomorrow’s headline: “Stockmarket plummets yet again as George W. Bush announces he’s sick of having Corn Flakes for breakfast and is switching to muesli.”
Archive for the 'Unsorted' Category
As an addendum to that last post I would like to express my emphatic agreement with the opinions of the wonderfully observant crew over at The Gruen Transfer. When they described Optus as “Telstra with a different name” they were bang on.
I just received my first bill from the lovely people at Optus. Oh what a joyous occasion.
- Expected bill: $49 + $7 (phone) + cost of special numbers and texts.
- Amount due: $104.70. O….K….
- I made $160.63 worth of calls. The plan includes $300 worth of calls/text.
- Instead the cap is listed as $149.56. Any way you look at it that number is not $300.
- Monthly Access fees of $68.97. What the?
- $6.97 worth of “Mobile Browsing Starter” fees. Riiiigght…
- $6.69 for 15 MB data is listed as “excluded from cap”. The plan includes 250 MB data… Obviously the word “include” has been erased from the dictionaries at Optus.
- Account period: 29 July to 21 August. My number was ported to Optus on 5th August. I’m not paying for any service before that date.
Now I finally understand the company slogan of “yes”.
“Yes! For your convenience, our billing system has been replaced with a giant random number generator.”
“Yes! Optus personally inspects every bill for mistakes and errors. This task is performed by our crack team of retarded zombie monkeys. We prefer to call them the Accounts department. It makes them feel like they’re an important part of our company.”
“Yes! Optus is an equal opportunity employer. That’s why our support phone number is answered by one of our many talented, yet hearing-impaired clones.”
I was going to ring up and abuse them tonight but I don’t have the energy right now for a good ear-bashing. They can wait a few days until I’m on holidays.
Bloody bastards.
I’ve just installed a few WordPress plugins to customise the admin interface. You won’t see the changes as a reader so I’m gonna blab on about them.
Lighter Menus has given me back some of that wasted space that appeared in version 2.6. Compare these two screenshots before and after installing it. You can’t see it with a screenshot but mouseing over those menus at the top produces drop-down menus containing the child menu items. The layout is still far from optimal, but its a huge improvement. If I had the time (and patience) I’d write my own plugin to clean it up even more. Maybe one day. This plugin also reduces the number of clicks required to get to any section of the admin interface from 2 to 1.
Dashboard: Draft Posts lists your draft posts on the WP dashboard. Assuming you start from the dashboard page, this reduces the number of clicks needed to edit a draft from 3 to 1, which is significant especially when you consider loading time. As editing drafts is something I do quite regularly, this is an absolute godsend. However, the dashboard is still filled with much bloat which pushes the Draft Posts widget down the page, requiring scrolling.
Dashboard Widget Manager lets you easily add, remove and reorder the dashboard widgets. I got rid of everything except Draft Posts, Recent Comments and Incoming Links. The relentless WordPress propaganda, I do not need.
If you’re a regular WordPress user I highly recommend these plugins.
While we’re on the subject, if you’ve tried unsuccessfully to use the WordPress plugin auto update feature and get the error “Could not create temporary file” you need to set the permissions on your wp-content folder to 777. Not a very “best practice” solution, I know. But it beats the old tedium of downloading over FTP then uploading.
A recent article in The Age worries me.
The Australian entertainment industry wants internet service providers to act as file-sharing police and caution people who download illegal copies of films, TV shows and music via peer-to-peer networks.
If this went mainstream I would seriously consider moving countries. It’s not like I download movies or anything… It’s the PRINCIPLE of the thing. This would just be the first step to Australia becoming China v2.0 with our own Great Firewall (Dividing Range?). For starters, push ups hurt. And then there’s the whole privacy issue. Maybe I could just install TOR and be done with it. Actually, if it does happen, I bet it won’t be long before someone invents the next Bittorrent, except this time with native traffic encryption.
Forgetting all that for a minute, the best argument against such filtering/monitoring is being put forward by the Internet Industry Association:
… the proposal is asking [ISPs] to become law enforcers. Executive director Peter Coroneos says it is akin to holding Australia Post liable for what people send in the mail.
And this is a valid comparison. What is the mail except a relatively slow and predominately non-digital conduit through which information is sent? Why is the Internet as a medium being targeted? Is it because flicking a couple of switches inside ISPs is more convenient than physically inspecting everyone’s mail? Or is it because of the sheer volume of illegal file sharing that is occurring?
To end, I will just say this: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Post-Pak full of DVDs.”
One of the top news headlines caught my eye this morning. A ship called “MS Explorer” has crashed into an iceberg off Antarctica. Passengers were observed scampering about the sinking ship, trying all manner of key combinations, but weren’t able to bring up the Task Manager and relaunch the Explorer.
I just have to ask what the owners were thinking naming a ship after something notorious for crashing over and over again? Argh! The irony is killing me!
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