Welcome, I bring you yet another mostly late post with the usual haphazard disconnect between subjects.

We had an election. A great chance to see the democratic process in action, or is it more like democratic theatre? There is a lot going on behind the scenes that I'm sure we're not aware of, and this time around I didn't have the time to pay a lot of attention to the polices of each party. This time however we did have a nicely IT related issue on the table. Labor wanting to build the NBN and implement the clean feed filter, vs the Liberal/National coalition opting out for mostly more of the same as we already have hybrid adsl/wireless/satellite mixture (wtf - cos they aren't at all similar) rolled out by private enterprises (so nothing new at all). Alas thinking the NBN is a great idea, but there's no point building it if you're just going to slow it all down (not to mention the high likelihood of the filter being ineffective and easy to circumvent). As per usual, the two parties both appear to me as poor options to vote for. Nothing new there. Of course one or the other will get in due to the preferential voting system we use. But it is our right as registered voters to participate in this indirect game of "who wants to be Australia's prime minster" or is it more like Big Brother were we vote out the ones we like the least? Now you see why I said theatre.

I was in Queensland a bit lately for work. Overall it's an odd place. Subway had rectangular swiss cheese, the weather was nice and a little humid. People were friendly and Optus still sucked. It was a cross between a slower pace of work, and a flat out mad sprint to get everything done in the allotted time. At least it was a change and got me out of the office a bit. We had to define a new term, "Mastercheffy" which was to describe various restaurants who were trying a bit too hard, mixing too many flavours and just being over the top. I actually found it hard to find simple food, everywhere was gourmet and being a coastal town, it was all seafood centric. Overall I was pleased with what I managed to achieve, though not 100% of what was set out, I managed to overcome most of the obstacles that appeared. The people in the office have a sort of enthusiastic energy about themselves which is great to be around. Everyone is friendly and inclusive. A stark contrast to the sterile hospital feeling that the Perth office has where you're just waiting for someone to stab you in the back with a katana when you're not looking.

Bike riding, oh yes that's something I do too. Turns out this whole Timor exercise is being rather expensive. A visit to the travel doctor to get stabbed multiple times for various exotic illnesses and stock up on tablets to solve many of the obviously expected dietary related issues resulted in a large charge to my credit card which a tiny amount apparently is covered by Medicare, and an even smaller amount by private health insurance. Being away meant less riding, and cold weather combined with lack of good sleep meant I've been riding less than I should. I'm not totally concerned about the Timor thing now, it's probably going to be all gravel track of varying quality, and I've ironed out the bike setup now. The roadie is getting less use though, commuting on the mountain bike will do that I guess. I'm sure when the weather improves it'll be back on like nothing happened. I also signed up for the Tour De Freedom 1000, so that's on again for sure. I'm sure you'd like to sponsor me for this event. grin Windows XP is no more for me. I got annoyed by windows again, this time from it suddenly BSODing and failing to boot, so I rebooted to linux and haven't gone back since. It's been grinding me down more and more as times gone on, mainly due to it's inability to manage memory correctly. At least there's chrome for linux, and it's faster than the windows build on the same hardware, mix in proper memory management and it's heaps faster. Though flash is less stable, and very slow. Swings and roundabouts. At least with NFS permissions inherit properly from Solaris. Overall a net positive then.

iiNet changed their plans again, now there is totally no point doing the upgrade/downgrade trick, it's still viable on the home2-home4 plans however there's a big got-cha. Even if you could download 1000gb a month you'd need to do 800gb of that (quota change from 2 to 4) as quick as possible, past experience shows you could probably do 100-130gb a day easily, however keeping that up for 6-8 days straight, not to mention balancing 400gb of that into 1am-9am timeslot would be complicated. Not impossible, but complicated. All for what, well if you were to upgrade for 8 days and downgrade again, you'd save less than $10 (factoring in the downgrade fee of course). So it's not worth the effort. If you were to want/need to download a large amount of data, you'd probably upgrade for 2 months straight at least to make it worth while before downgrading again. Uploads are now counted too, but as a Usenet user (peer to peer is so 1999 (send help if I ever go back on IRC)) it looks like the volume uploaded while downloading is roughly 2%. So for every 1000meg down, you upload maybe 20meg. Not bad, considering I've now got twice the quota I had before for the same money. Also scary is I'm now on the second bottom plan, and the bottom one is probably for people who only check the email once a week. Amazing how times have changed.

Being away from home for a week I had a bit of tv watching to catch up on. I must admit Warehouse 13 is really growing on me. The whole concept of retro steampunk-esq old advanced tech is neat. Roll in some Eureka style time travel stories and you might end up with some accidental retro optimization.