National Broadband

Yay. It looks like the National Broadband Network will be available in my area in 3-4 years (as long as Tony Abbott doesn’t bring it all to a grinding halt.)

Update 7 Feb 2015: Three years on and no sign of the NBN in my area. The NBN Rollout Map has even given up providing estimates on when it might arrive, tersely stating that “The NBN rollout has not started in your area.” Tony Abbott/Malcolm Turnbull are still stuck on providing a second rate system.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Disgusted / Delighted

Currently disgusted by …
Clive Palmer, who spitefully utters ridiculous accusations about the CIA funding the environmental movement in Australia, then openly acknowledges that he knows that the accusations are not true, then arrogantly asserts that he does not regret making the accusations.

(Note to Clive – just because you have more money than everyone else doesn’t make you more important or more wise.)

Currently delighted by …
The Newcastle Knights 20-6 win over the Bulldogs on the weekend.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Windows 8

From what I had read, and the few screenshots I had seen of Windows 8, my initial impressions were that it is ugly and confusing. I decided on the weekend to put my preconceptions aside, download the community preview of Windows 8 and give it a try. My conclusion? Windows 8 is ugly and confusing.

Update 7 Feb 2015: Three years on, and my thoughts on Windows 8 are unchanged – ugly and confusing.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Floppy nostalgia

I indulged in a bit of nostalgia on the weekend after my 10yr old son found a 5.25″ floppy disk in the back of my desk drawer and asked what it was. I headed down to shed and found an old 5.25″ disk drive, installed it in an old computer, and after a bit of fiddling around getting the ribbon connectors and BIOS setup correct, I was then able to boot into MSDOS 5.0 on the A: drive and relive those unforgettable grinding/clunking noises unique to old floppy disk drives.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Disagreeaphobia

I’m getting pretty tired of proponents of gay marriage impulsively labelling people who disagree with them as ‘homophobes’. People who disagree with stealing don’t get labelled theftophobes, people who think lying is wrong don’t get labelled as deceitophobes.

I’m beginning to wonder if all these people who jump at the ‘homophobe’ label aren’t just a bunch of disagreeaphobes?

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Irritationary

I got stung by an iOS update on my iPhone 3GS – again. This time I was updating from iOS 5.01 to 5.1 and all seemed to progress OK right up to the point where the iPhone rebooted. At this point, the phone would just show the Apple logo for about a minute followed by a progress bar that would not budge.

In the end I had to do a Restore (using the button on the Device page in iTunes) followed by a restore of settings from a backup, followed by a resyncing of all my apps/music/books – all of which took several hours.

Not very “resolutionary”, more “irritationary”.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

What’s Hot Not Now

I discovered today how to turn off the “What’s Hot” display in Google+ – a gripe of mine from a previous post.

You click on the “What’s hot” link on the left side of the page and then on the “What’s hot” page there’s a slider where you control how many entries to display in your stream – I chose zero – my favourite number for today.

I don’t know how long this control has been there (possibly always) but I wish I had discovered it earlier.

Update 7 Feb 2015: With Google’s constant changing of Google+, what I wrote above is no longer relevant. The constant changing is part of the reason I now blog on my own website and eschew Google+.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]