Yesterday we took a day trip to Sydney primarily due to the fact we still had a Sydney Tower / Aquarium / Wildlife pass from Quinn’s photo competition haul from earlier this year.

Anyway… there are a few photos up on Facebook of the Sydney Tower but thought I’d also share this photo here on the Blog of Leon sleeping on the way home. Our little boy may be growing up quickly but it is photos like this that make us think he is the cutest baby-o in the world…

Admitedly this sleep turned out to be a 10 minute micronap and then he stayed awake for the rest of the journey outlasting the staying power of our other 2 cherubs!

Wow… didn’t realise it had been so long since my last post and it isn’t as if I’ve been doing nothing! We’ve had lots happening offline lately but, I guess the most likely reason for my lack of posts can probably be more attributable to the fact that my free time has usually been taken up playing games on the XBox 360 I recently acquired.

Already built up quite a library of good games for it and have actually completed a couple, namely ‘Gears of War’ and ‘Portal‘.

I confess I’m slotting this post into the blog quite a bit of time after the fact but thought Quinn’s 6th birthday was a good reason for a backpost!

I took the day off work and, after getting through the present opening (a new bike being the main thing), we had a day out around Canberra which included a bike ride around the lake and a trip out to Fyshwick to go on the go-karts. Here’s a photo, admittedly a bit dark but the best we have, of Quinn on a go-kart. Yes… at 6 he is allowed to go on by himself and he was actually very good at it! The staff there even commented it was quite impressive to see a 6 year old concentrating so hard on correctly steering the go-kart (usually they head off in a straight line into the tyre barriers apparently).

I guess the time he has spent on Mario Kart Wii wasn’t all to waste!

A few weeks ago I accidentally stumbled across a piece of software called Rosetta Stone which, for those who don’t know it, is a very clever piece of software used to teach you a foreign language. With this software I also obtained all the French CDs and have been quietly working my way through the course to brush up on my French.

Although I’m still only a little way into the course I do feel it is improving my French in leaps and bounds.

As a supplement I thought I probably should also find some audio recordings that I could listen to in the car or on my MP3 player at lunchtime. After some searching around and trying a few out I again accidentally came across something called the “Michel Thomas Method” - at first I was sceptical based on all the glowing praise about how incredible it was. I’ve always been sceptical of those motivational courses and how to become a millionaire course etc so, with all the comments about his method, was a bit dubious this was all just some marketing for some run of the mill french course.

Anyway, I decided to try them out…. OMG!!!! I’m converted…. Michel Thomas is an absolute genius! The way he teaches French is incredible and after listening to only 4 of his CDs so far I’ve learnt more from him than I ever learnt in the classroom when I was back at school learning French. If I had this guy as my French teacher back then I would be speaking French fluently by now I’m sure!

I rarely am prepared to give the tag “Genius” to anybody but this guy truly is one… his knowledge of language is incredible and his ability to explain how language works and his teaching method generally is just something truly special! Given that he died in 2005, aged 90, I’m so happy that he recorded his teachings so that his legacy could continue.

RIP Michel Thomas, you have my greatest respect and I’m only sorry that I never discovered you sooner…. preferably before you died so that I would have been able to thank you!

As an aside though I must say that his accent and mannerisms on the recordings sounds like Serge Gainsbourg (another rare individual I would class as a genius…. also deceased). I therefore do find it a little funny that I feel I am being teached French by Serge Gainsbourg sometimes when I listen to Michel Thomas’ recordings!

Anyway… if you want to learn French I would truly recommend you check out Michel Thomas…. together with the course I’m doing through Rosetta Stone I feel I’m making great progress in finally unlocking the French language that has so fascinated me for so many years.

With Muppet at work tonight I decided to watch a movie and the choice was “Doomsday“. I must admit I had never heard of this film until I saw a trailer for it the other day quite by accident and thought its tale of Scotland under lockdown from a deadly virus with a definite tribute to Mad Max looked worth a viewing. Luckily I was not disappointed! What a great little film… and the lead actress Rhona Mitra certainly took my fancy. This lady is destined for a great career methinks and I hope to see more of her in an action role like this again.

Anyway, the film will not win any oscars but if you’re looking for a fun sci-fi/horror tale in the vein of Mad Max then look no further…. plus its not American which is always a good thing too of course! And yes the poster image I’ve put on the blog is the French poster for the film but I liked this poster image much more than the UK version.

The last few weeks have been very frustrating computer wise…

Firstly, a few weeks ago, I discovered all my sites (then hosted by a provider called Siteocity) appeared to be offline with a notice saying they’d been suspended and I needed to contact billing.

At first I assumed I had accidentally missed the renewal date but it turned out that instead, somebody had been using a script on my sites, to run some malicious code to try and steal customer details from some American bank!!!

After initially convincing Siteocity that I had no idea this was happening they agreed to put back up my site on the basis that I removed the offending security loophole. As I had no idea what this loophole was they advised me it was a “Hacked Forum” - now a forum to me is a discussion board… so I said the only forum I had upon my webspace was one on LibNET but I agreed, if that was what was causing the problem, I was happy for them to remove it.

Anyway… 24 hours later my site is back up and online… all good I think! I wander through the site, checking everything is working as it should and I notice that the polls script on the front page of LibNET appears to have been broken. Now I simply assumed this was as a result of Siteocity stuffing it up by having my site offline and then restoring it… it never occurred to me that this was the “Hacked Forum” to which they had previously referred.

So, I fix the poll script and all looks good! Great, back to normal….

 24 hours later… Site down again!

Now what? I go back to Siteocity live support chat and I am informed that my site has been taken down again for the same reason as before and that they are under strict instruction never to restore it again!

After numerous emails, some of which were very detailed and long, I believe I had explained the situation from my viewpoint and the fact that I am not psychic and do not know that their comment of a “Hacked Forum” was actually to be read as “Poll Script”

But it was a total waste of my time. They had made their decision to remove the site and would not even give me a refund for the period of credit I had with them.

Luckily, after several days of pestering them I eventually managed to get a backup of the whole site and have now finally managed to relocate it all to a server at Bluehost… well, except LibNET, which is currently still down and I need to have a closer look at before I put it back up in its current form as I don’t want a repeat performance.

Anyway, you can probably imagine how pissed I was to have all this stuffing around! Not what I needed to be doing although I guess on the good side it has put me back in the mood to do some webpage stuff so I’ll probably finally get around to updating my pages again now.

And Siteocity, you SUCK! So, if anybody reads this who is looking for a web host, let this be a warning to you… at Siteocity you are considered guilty without trial, you will waste your energy if you try to write them long emails, they will just ignore most of what you say and send extremely rude emails to you… half their support staff seem to be linguistically challenged when it comes to communicating in English and if you ever want a refund, not a chance! DO NOT USE THEM! I will make it my quest now to bad mouth them all around the net!

Oh, and btw, I’m not saying Bluehost are necessarily the best web host on the net, but it sure opened my eyes as to what a much better deal you can get than with Siteocity.

So, that’s my server woes of the last few weeks… oh, and don’t even get me started about setting up my father-in-law’s new computer that didn’t like his old Alcatel modem! That’s been another saga within itself…

But anyway, it’s all good now! I’m cool!

Last night I did a little celebration dance at finally getting my Mario Kart Wii online ranking over 7000… by 1 point!

After I basked in the glory of this monumental moment I quickly finished playing Mario Kart Wii before another race would no doubt see me slip back into the 6000s. Of course, I’m so addicted to Mario Kart Wii I will no doubt play it again tonight and most likely I will get pushed back down below 7000 and rather than dance, I will no doubt curse and swear at the TV and have to resist hurling my wiimote across the room!

But hey, I *WAS* over 7000… at least for one day!!!

Well to conclude my last few posts I’m now up to speed with ADSL2+ and obtaining speeds of up to about 1100kB/s going down and about 100kB/s going up. And I think, given my distance from the exchange, that is gonna be as good as it gets for the next few years…

Now, the point of this post… With Muppet doing a lot of night shifts at the local supermarket over these last few weeks it has given me quite a bit of solo time at home (after the kids are in bed of course).

Normally I usually take that time to play games but instead, these last few days, I’ve been using the time to rewatch some classic films. Yesterday it was Pulp Fiction (still a great film) and today it was American Beauty.

I had seen this film back when it first came out in 1999 but really had fogotten how great it was. This film truly is a classic and I think I have to rank it in my Top 10 films of all time… and I think to be honest I appreciated it more with this second viewing. I suspect maybe it is connected to the fact that I feel myself getting into my late 30’s and know that, like the main character in the film, I will soon be in that similar age bracket and probably assessing life.

Not that this post is suggesting my life is anything like the character portrayed so magnificently by Kevin Spacey in this film!!!

Anyway, just wanted to note down what a classic it is and urge anybody who reads this who has never seen the film to do themselves a favour and see it asap!

Next on my hit list…. “The Usual Suspects”

Well I still haven’t changed from the old Alcatel Speedtouch Home modem yet but I have changed the filters on the phone line to more modern ADSL2+ compliant ones. I did buy a cheap DSL-G604T router/modem off EBay with the thought this would replace the Alcatel and my D-Link DI-524 set up but I’m having extreme difficulties getting the G604T to sync with the ADSL line… very odd… not sure if its a crappy unit that I’ve been stung with off EBay or whether it is just a pain in the ass to configure.

Either way, I pretty much gave up on it for the moment and purchased on EBay a Netcomm NB5 modem which I’ll use with the DI-524 instead. This was also pretty cheap but at least it is supposedly brand new in its box so hopefully shouldn’t give me any issues.

I’ll probably either resell the G604T or, if I can figure out how to make it work as a repeater/access point I may be able to make use of it in getting my wifi signal to our outdoor rumpus room… guess we’ll see how we go on.

Anyway, the point of this post, even on my half-way-house ADSL2+ set up, and bearing in mind my 3km or so distance from the exchange, I just downloaded a 720MB torrent at a rate of around 700kB/s meaning I downloaded it in just less than 18 minutes! I’m pretty impressed with that… it used to take me about 2 hours on my old ISP.

Back in 1996, when I went to Paris to see Mylene Farmer on tour, I met up with numerous people off the internet. One such person, whom I got to know well after sitting in the queue with him for what must have been 10 hours, was a guy a called Carl Lafontaine from Montreal, Canada.

Although we stayed in touch by IRC for a few years after the concert, our offline lives obviously got the better of us both and we eventually drifted off IRC and lost touch. I was therefore quite surprised last year when we tried to track down some old IRC members and I discovered Carl was an integral part of a band called ‘Mute’ who appeared to be having some underground success in Montreal and looked to be on the verge of breaking into the big time.

Having got back in touch with Carl and having listened to some of their music I’ve been looking forward to hearing and seeing more from his band and, I’m pleased to say, after recently visiting their website it looks like things are going well with a new remixed/remastered version of their debut album now available.

I was also excited to see that they had released their first professionally produced debut video clip on the site for a song called “Code Unknown”. I personally think it is VERY impressive and I wish them all great success… check it out….

If you want to visit their official site it is:-
‘We are mute. Can you hear us?’

Well the churn to TPG successfully occurred as scheduled on Wednesday, 18 June although I am still awaiting the new ADSL2+ modem I purchased off Ebay. I’m also still using old ADSL1 filters from 5+ years ago so I know they need to still be updated too.

So, bearing that in mind, and the fact I’m still using the old non-ADSL2 compliant Alcatel Speedtouch Home modem and a D-Link DI-524 router my new speeds, per speedtest.net, are 5324k down and 662k up.  Thats a 4 times increase in download speed and a 3 times increase in upload speed.

So… alls good! Will update the speeds again when I get all my equipment upgraded.

Changing your ISP is a bit like changing your bank, insurer or superannuation provider. It is a task that we seldom do. And so it is with a little bit of sadness that, after over 5 years good service, I say bye bye to Netspace.

And why am I leaving? Well… to be honest, Netspace tried to offer me a free upgrade to ADSL2+. Sounds good? I thought so too and was very nearly on the verge of signing up but decided I perhaps should take the time to look around at what else is on offer. And this dear Netspace is where your free offer ultimately backfired as I discovered a much better plan on your rival TPG. An ISP I originally used at dial-up speeds when I first moved to Australia.

At a price of AU$69.99 per month, which is $10 less than I was paying Netspace, I will now get ADSL2+ speeds and a download limit of 150GB which is a remarkable 90GB’s more than the ADSL2+ plan that Netspace was offering! Admittedly I’m doubtful I can leach 150GB per month but its nice to have the option!

As regards speed on ADSL2+, that remains to be seen and no doubt I’ll post about that soon. I’m not expecting too much as I’m about 2.5kms away from the telephone exchange however, looking at TPG’s statistics I can see closeby users in my street are achieving download speeds of about 9Mbps with upload speeds of just over 1Mbps. Of course, I think I will need to upgrade my modem and line filters to get that speed as I’m still using an old Alcatel Speedtouch Home modem which isn’t ADSL2+ compatable and filters that are 5+ years old. Guess we’ll see what happens next week when hopefully the change occurs… got to be an improvement on my 1500/256 plan though!

Using speedtest.net tonight I am currently getting speeds of 1284kbps down and 210kbps up. Will give me something to compare to when the switch to TPG occurs.

My beautiful little Princess turned 4 today… Here’s a photo of her after she opened her presents this morning. And yes, being 4 means she is now old enough for Barbie dolls! Argh!

Today I purchased a 4gb USB sandisk cruzer. There are various reasons I purchased one of these but without going into detail the prime reason was my annoyance with the restrictive document management system that has been imposed upon my workplace.

Anyway, I just figured I had purchased a 4gb memory stick… nothing too exciting there! Until I realised the thing came pre-installed with some U3 software… what the hell is this I thought? Well now I realise it is software designed to run directly off the USB device without leaving any trace on the PC upon which you are using it. Doesn’t sound that exciting but after realising this meant I could stick Open Office software, Firefox and even a SNES emulator upon it which I could then easily use on any computer I plug it into I realise this was something indeed worth investigating further!

I also discovered the pre-installed cruzersync program was also very useful in backing up my email and accounting software everytime I plug it into my PC.  And some nice web editing software and FTP clients so I can update my webpage from any computer when I feel in the mood to do so. Not bad… not bad at all!

Yes I’m a nerd and yes, this technology is apparently a couple of years old and its probably old hat to most people reading this blog but hey, I’m impressed!

Today we purchased a second-hand RoboRaptor for AU$40. Quite a bargain I think when they still retail in stores for AU$129 and the second-hand one we purchased was still in its box and hardly seems used. I’m not too surprised though, it is one of those toys that is good for a while but then probably ends up in a cupboard collecting dust… this also seems supported by the fact that on EBay they don’t seem to sell for very much either.

Anyway, not sure at this stage how much use it will get… so far only I have had a play with it just to test it! The toy is really for Quinn as a swap for one of the Microsoft VX6000 WebCams he won in the Aussie Photo Festival competition as what the heck is a 5 year old going to do with a webcam? We have therefore listed a webcam for sale and are effectively swapping it for the RoboRaptor for him and, although we would have given him the RoboRaptor today, his behaviour as hardly been deserving of getting a new toy. Anyway… works better this way, I got to play with it in peace when he was in bed!

My personal opinion, I’m quite impressed… the robot seems a bit wobbly on its feet but no matter how hard I tried I could not get it to fall over. Will be interesting also to see the kid’s reactions to it… not sure if it will scare Zoe and Leon. The latter I can quite easily see being terrorised by the RoboRaptor being controlled to follow him around the house!

I’m not normally the type of person to pre-order a game… I’ve never really understood why people do it when they usually get no benefit and end up paying a deposit on a game months in advance when, on the day it is finally released it is available everywhere anyway!

However, for the first time in my life, I have pre-ordered a game… Wii-Fit, due out in Australia on 8 May 2008. Why? Well…. Dick Smith Power House (usually an absolute rip off of a store) actually give you AU$10 off if you pre-order it making the full price only AU$134. Usual gaming outlets like EB Games and JB-Hifi tell me they are stocking it for AU$149 so very unusual that Dick Smith are effectively AU$15 cheaper!

What really amused me though was, when I asked in EB Games what their price was going to be they offered to price match if I found it cheaper anywhere else… now firstly I’m sure they are not dumb and know it is AU$15 cheaper only a few hundred meters away but secondly, do they really expect me to come running back from Dick Smith to tell them the price just so I can buy it at the same price from EB Games? Do they really think the average customer is going to be that loyal to EB Games that they would waste time price checking it all over town to go back there and pay the same price? C’mon EB Games… Get real! You can keep your silly price match scheme… why don’t you just offer it at a good price to start with???

[Update] Quite surprisingly when I actually picked up the Wii Fit from Dick Smith they price-matched against Big W who was selling the Wii Fit for AU$124 so I was very happy as a) Big W usually always advertise and half the time never have any in stock and b) idiots like EB games are still selling it at AU$149!!!

Here’s a photo of Quinn with some, but not all, of the prizes he got from the Aussie Kids Photo Festival.

The prizes included the following and, because he won both 3rd place in Friends & Family and the Peoples Choice Award it meant we got some duplicate items which he could share with Zoe:-

2 x Microsoft Showbags - each containing a VX6000 Webcam, Drink Bottle, very tacky Microsoft bear (not in photo) and a Microsoft Cap / 2 x Nickelodeon Showbags - each containing Patrick plush toy (sporting the T-shirt stolen from the Microsoft bear), Nickelodeon cap, T-shirt and blow up ball / A Twister Dodgeball game (quite fun actually!) / a transformers car / a large transformers robot (do people really pay AU$90 for this crap?) / A cheap fujifilm camera / 2 x T-shirts containing the winning photo he took of Zoe / A printed canvas containing Zoe’s photo (not yet received but should be posted to us soon) and last but not least a nice FujiFilm Finepix A900 9 megapixel digital camera with leather case and 1gb SD card.

Some of the stuff we don’t intend to keep… the Microsoft teddies I think will end up under a Xmas wishing tree, the webcams will probably be sold and to be honest, Quinn has no real interest in the Transformer toys. I’m just glad he won the digital camera though as I was intending to buy him one regardless so this saves me the bother and gives him a camera better than I would probably have brought him anyway!

Today we spent the day in Sydney so that Quinn could collect his prizes for the Aussie Kids Photo Festival (see earlier post). I’m very happy to say he also won the Peoples Choice Award (thanks to Muppet and her mobilisation of all friends and family she could get to vote!). This meant he won a huge amount of loot including a brand new digital camera that puts my own camera to shame!

Quinn seemed a little bit bemused by the event (which to be honest seemed a little bit disorganised) and I think he was also not that interested in meeting Spongebob (we have a suspicion that he is already aware Spongebob was just somebody in a costume and not the REAL Spongebob) however, luckily we did get a couple of nice photos of Quinn with the presenters of Nickelodeon Australia, Kyle and Maud. This photo was actually taken after the ceremony as Kyle and Maud were leaving and it was nice to see they still had time to chat and have their photo taken with Quinn… they genuinely seem like nice guys who really enjoy dealing with kids… ie, I can’t compare them to Krusty the Clown!

Quinn, Zoe and Leon also thoroughly enjoyed visiting the Sydney Aquarium again and so did we given the fact that it was free thanks to having free entry to attend the award ceremony. And in addition, as part of Quinn’s prize we also now have another free pass to the Aquarium and the related wildlife centre and Sydney Tower to be used by the end of the year… nice!