Category Archives: Rants

MobileMe is sort of useless

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I thought I might give MobileMe a try. For those that don’t know, MobileMe is a subscription service from Apple that allows you to push your calendar and contact information to a web-portal (at http://me.com), and from there you can sync multiple Windows and Mac OS X devices (and iPhones!), making sure you have consistent information across all of them. Sounds great.

The devices I want to keep in sync are:

  • My work laptop – a Windows machine running Outlook and connected to our corporate Exchange server
  • My personal laptop – a MacBook Pro
  • My phone – an iPhone 3GS

So… I go to the web site and sign up for the 60-day trial. All good. I install the special “MobileMe Control Panel” on my Windows system. I open up the configuration. I then discover that it won’t sync my Outlook contacts or calendar information if you use Exchange.

USELESS! Failed experiment, trial cancelled. Apple, seriously, fix this up. I can’t believe you expect people to pay $119 a year for this.

Optus & DNS

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This morning I decided to shift our family blog from Blogger to WordPress. No big deal, just a matter of changing some DNS entries. Or so I thought.

First of all I went through the motions, creating the account and getting it set up. Then I went to my registrar of choice and edited the DNS settings. So far, so good.

After leaving it a few hours I decided to check on the status of the propagation. I was more than a litte surprised to discover that the address coming back was neither the current or the new one!

Turns out that there is a fault with the primary name server at my ISP, OptusNet Cable. The secondary is fine. Yes, it’s a bit odd.

I just lost twenty minutes of my life trying to explain to the guy on the other end of the phone that there is an issue. I don’t really care about it as I now use OpenDNS anyway, but I figured it was polite to let them know that something on their network is broken. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the first level support guys neither understand nor care.

Bottom line: Use OpenDNS.

AOTD: People who drive really fast in car parks

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AOTD: Annoyance of the day.

I’m lucky enough that my employer provides a reserved parking space for me in our office building. Like most office car parks, it’s underneath the building, going down six levels via narrow and windy driveways.

Now, I appreciate that at the end of the day everyone wants to get home. But is there any need to drive as fast as you can around the blind corners, with no regard for anyone that might be walking or driving past already?

I’m still alive, but only just!

Bloody Adobe!

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As part of a school project, Campbell was using my camera over the weekend to take some pictures of the bits and pieces she had been using to make a fire extinguisher. As I do, I loaded the Nikon raw files into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, converting to Adobe’s digital negative format at the same time. Imagine my horror when I couldn’t convert the images to jpeg.

Turns out it’s all my own fault. I upgraded as soon as a new version was released.

It seems there is a bug in the DNG converter in version 1.4 of Lightroom. Not the version for Mac, apparently, only Windows. I guess the folks at Adobe still assume that anyone doing anything arty is using a Mac.

Thankfully, rolling back to the previous release was quick, painless, and restored what had been broken. But the real issue is why did this happen in the first place? It’s a pretty obvious piece of functionality that should be well and truly embedded in the test plans by this stage. If I was someone who depended on this software for my income I would be really upset (as opposed to mildly annoyed).

I can only imagine the outcry if, say, Microsoft released an update for Office that meant you couldn’t save an Excel file once you’d loaded it.

Airline pain

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I had to kill a few hours in terminal 4 at LAX today, so I went to the lounge to chill out. As American Airlines do, they reminded me on the way in to keep an eye on the monitors as they don’t make boarding announcements in the lounge.

Two problems with this:

  1. The monitors are few and far between, so you have to keep walking from wherever you’ve managed to find a seat (not enough room there) so you can see what’s going on.
  2. Half the time they don’t update the screens anyway! I kept checking my connection, the status never changed to “boarding”, yet all of a sudden I had people paging me to get on the plane.

Which brings us to the best bit: It doesn’t matter if they make a boarding call or not, just wait until they go looking for you and stroll down then.

No more "Get This"

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Tue, 2007-10-16 04:50
A sad day for fans with the Triple M network announcing that they have axed Tony Martin’s daily show, Get This.  Axing the show makes perfect sense.  I mean, ratings only double while it’s on.  Go figure.  Go and download all the podcasts while you can.
Just found this:  http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/SaveGetThis.  I doubt it will help, but hey, sign it anwyay!

Damaged goods

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Finished up at my old job yesterday. (Hooray!) I had a fairly long exit clause in my contract – I actually had to give three months notice. I never really thought they would hold onto me for that long, but it was no big deal if they did.

Anyway, one of my co-workers was heard to say, "We’ll make him serve out the three months. There is no way the new company will want to hold a position open that long, so by the time his notice period expires and he can leave he won’t have any job and he’ll be stuffed."

I’ll be honest, I have never got on well with this guy. He always seemed to be a nasty piece of work; two faced and conniving, only concerned with himself. But this is totally mad! How many times do you have to be dropped on your head as a child to think like that?

Mind you, he’s doing a really great job of pissing everyone off. You can count the number of friends he has in the office on the toes of one hand. I don’t wish him ill. I don’t need to. He’s doing a good enough job of screwing up his life without any bad luck from me.

Next G? Bah!

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Call me crazy, but rather than spending a squillion on advertising their Next G mobile network, wouldn’t Telstra better serve their customers by eliminating dead spots? How nice would it be to travel from Town Hall to the airport with continuous coverage? I know, I live in a dream world.

VT Commodore tail lamps

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Just replaced the both the left and right rear lamp assemblies on my 1999 VT Commodore. Why? Because the bulb holders had cracked and were starting to fall apart, meaning we had been left without tail or brake lights.

Now, I accept that the car is almost seven years old, and parts fail. But I get concerned when the bulbs last longer than the bulb holders. Then, the guy in spare parts said that:

  • he wasn’t surprised we were replacing them
  • that they sold a lot of the assemblies
  • pointed out that the new ones were a totally different design and material to the originals

Obviously, there is a problem, which can result in a serious safety hazard. Holden, do the right thing and get these things recalled and checked.

Airport fun

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I don’t want to hear anyone complain about airport security ever again. After arriving at LAX at 6am, we missed our 8.22am connection to San Francisco because it took so long to get through passenger screening. AAARRRGGGGHHH!! Luckily, the nice people at American Airlines have rebooked us onto the 10am flight. Some time to relax in the lounge….

It all started so well this morning. We got a lift out to Melbourne airport nice and early with Eddie, a friend who works there. The check-in staff moved us from the 7.45 to the 6.30 domestic flight to Sydney, which gave us a little more breathing space to get the connection to LAX.

Discovered a funny thing when we met up with Joyce: she already had a boarding pass for the flight from LA up to San Francisco. “Cool!” we thought, and went off to see if we could check in for that flight as well. Sadly, no.

The immigration queue wasn’t too bad; long, but moved pretty swiftly. We went to the plane, with the only hiccup being that Bren got singled out for the “Flying to America bag and body search”. Joyce and myself zoomed straight past all that, giving us a few minutes to have a chuckle about how much like a terrorist Bren looks.

Flight over: Long, uneventful (except for the two drunk guys down the back getting a little agitated. There were some cops waiting at the gate when we got off, I wonder if the boys actually made it into the country before being sent back home?).

Made it to LA. First mission was to check in for our transfer to San Francisco. No worries, except apparently for an issue with Bren’s travel. Seems her itinerary was modified, but the ticket never re-issued. So the American Airlines people had to stuff around for a while to make it all work. Thanks for that Qantas. Love your work.

That sorted, we then tried to board the plane. No such luck. The queue for passenger security screening was literally out the door, down to the next terminal, back again, up the stairs, the length of the concourse, back again, and then back again! And then, Joyce had the magic “SSS” on her boarding pass, so she had to line up for the “special” screening. End result, we missed the flight.

Got rebooked on the 10.30, and off to San Francisco with no worries. Aside from trying to stay awake, that is!

When we got to our hotel, our room wasn’t quite ready, so we wandered down the road to find some lunch. Ended up at a little Italian place, and had a wonderful spicy prawn pizza. Very yummy!

Then wandered around for a while, found Union Square, looked around some shops.

Back home, and we pretty much all collapsed from exhaustion!