This Week in WallStrip Tumbling along...

On TwiT (This Week in Tech) recently I heard of site called tumblr. Tumblr is basically a scrapbook blogging system where as you traverse the internet you write about what sites you visted. Its the lazy man's way of blogging, but I can see the attraction. After all writing a blog takes a lot of effort. Each entry can take around an hour to write depending on how much work you want to put into it. With tumblr its mostly a short entry about what you visited and then about it. Which got me thinking, hey laziness is good. Means time for MORE stuff. Which is the model I'm taking today.

TwiT referred me to an absolutely awesome site and consequently I've found someone new to drool over. Shes about even with Jade Raymond. Shes a hot skinny brunette, shes funky, shes funny and shes financy...(ok that was a struggle to fit that last 'f'). Shes Lindsay Campbell, the presenter of WallStrip. As they like to say, wallstrip is stock culture meets pop culture. Its about the culture at wall street, about different businesses and why investors love them and when it comes down to it, its really about having fun. Lindsay and her mate seem to really get a kick out of doing the show and it is full of energy and humour. And come on, isnt that every guys dream? A chick who knows money, who does comedy for a job and whos very hot? (Not to mention she would have got the lions share of the $5,000,000 USD that CBS paid to buy wallstrip.com.).

GPS Navigation aka In 100m U-Turn and smash into the next car.

As some of you know, my folks invested in a GPS navigational unit. Its a TomTom One XL for $540 and we've been playing with it for the last few weeks on 'trial' basis. This means we pay upfront but if we're not happy with it, we can give it back and get a full refund.

The TomTom One XL is like any other GPS, in that you program where you want to go, and it'll guide you there with voice prompts and map information. Around our local area the instructions are quite accurate and easy to understand. Programming where you want to go is intuitive and the user interface is excellent. You can tell that the TomTom product management got real mums and dads in to test this as opposed to programmers. They even offer multiple voices to customize who you get to yell at when the directions are crazy. I selected the British Jane voice because come on British women sound so sexy!

We went on a more 'rural' trip to Mulgoa and Warragamba Dam and the One XL found roads which were faster than what we knew, found petrol stations at the touch of a button (ok a few buttons, but easy enough) and got us home safely.
Of course rural areas are easy due to the long stretches of road, and lack of confusing streets. For a real test we took it to the city.

There are some sequences which are difficult for it to process. For example if I'm going to north sydney, I can't easily tell it to avoid the Lane cove tunnel, BUT to allow taking the M2 motorway. To do that I'd need to give it two waypoints which can be difficult if you don't know anything about the area.

It is going to the city with its crazy road implementation that I realized I cannot rely on the voice navigation. You do really need to look at the graphical display to get an idea of which road to turn into, when to turn in and so on. The clear, large car-centered GPS map with arrows really does make up for some questionable driving instructions. For example, when coming back on Longeuville road trying to get onto the M2, it decided to give this wildly mad suggestion of doing an suicidal U-Turn in a major traffic junction that on a hill. No thanks.
Luckily if you do override what it says and just drive on, it'll throw away the old course and recalculate it for you and usually it'll get it right this time.

There are a few things that its missing that I wish it had. It doesn't show traffic lights, speed cameras and doesn't really get the speed limits on all roads. That said, I'm fairly happy with the TomTom One XL, and won't be returning it. Its not perfect, but it seems to do the job well enough to justify its expense. That said, a GPS Navigator is not a substitute for past knowledge of the route and being aware of whats going on. It is an aid, and a fallback when you have nothing else.

The cable modem is dead, long live the Cable Modem!

Lets take a few microts (seconds in FarScape-speak) to mourn the loss of my Nortel Networks 100 series cable modem. It has served faithfully from early 2005 on the second day that Optus@Home was rolled out to greedy bandwidth junkies everywhere. It has survived storms, stupid misconfigurations at home, and terabytes worth of.. 'bittorrent linux isos' downloads.

But like all good things, it has to come to an end. When I first got cable, I was getting 1.2Mbyte/sec downloads. Two years ago I got 600-700kb/s and I figured it was just because there were more users on the network. More recently I realized I was actually maxing out at 250Kbytes/sec and THAT was unacceptable. First reaction was to move over to this new sexy ADSL2+ technology that everyone raves about. It was all good until I realized how expensive it was! Even internode, one of the cheaper vendors was 2.5$/Gig whilst optus is about 1.94$/Gig. With the number of TV shows I watch, this is terrible. Besides this, ADSL hasn't had a stellar record for reliability. I regularly hear of ADSL outages whilst with my 7 years of optus cable I've could probably count the optus@fault outages in mere hours.

So I rang up optusnet support, lied about my download speed (Optusnet do not help you unless you're below 200kb/s) and got them to finally look into my case. Their suggestion based on their tests indicated it was time to replace the modem. So the optus tech came over and replaced it on saturday with a new Motorola SB5 series modem. I think the results speak for themselves.

Old Modem
Line speed = 1.89Mbps
download speed is 257kb/s

New Modem
Line speed = 10.59Mbps
download speed = 1.27MB/s

Long live Cable!

Samurai Pizza Kats (minus the Pizza)

A bunch of firsts on this weekend. I took a trip to Balmain to have a birthday dinner with my friends from work. Our place of culinary conquest was the Samurai Japanese Cafe, a tiny little restaurant right opposite the Cat'n'Fiddle hotel.
I was stoked by how great the place was. It was a proper restaurant experience but with a ridiculous amount of food. In fact it was slightly too much. I had the Dinner box deluxe, which was effectively 5 courses of food. It was so much that even an hour after we left, it was still sitting in my stomach! In addition the service was great and when Jen mentioned to the waiter that it was Sunny and mine's birthday, they even got us dessert and individual special gifts!! I love gifts so they instantly went into my best restaurants EVAR (sic) category.

I actually did something I rarely do the following day, which is to login to the webpage that recommended the restaurant (eatability.com) and posted a review. If you ever used someone on a site's recommendation to make a choice, it makes sense to repay the favour and add your own recommendation. After all you're helping someone else in making a decision.

Our next stop was the Cat'n'Fiddle hotel where Katherine's band Kinetic was playing. The Cat isn't a bad place, but I wish SOMEONE would enforce the no-smoking policy. As I may have ranted before, smokers need to have their cigarettes blow up in their faces. But anyhoo.
Kat's band was pretty decent, though it didn't exactly blow me away. They were definitely a lot better then the band before and after them at least. Kat looked and (mostly) sounded amazing, but she clearly got tired halfway through the performance as she sounded like she was on helium for one of the songs. The funny part was she was wearing these arm warmers which were clearly for the entire sex appeal/fashion thing, yet I was going, man thats such an awesome idea! Now I can wear short sleeves and not be cold, where can get me some of that! I suspect it would look a bit gay on guys however so alas.

All in all, a good night.