NSW ALL THE WAY
Damn, it’s Wednesday night, and state of origin #2 for 2011…. I don’t know what I was thinking… And we won!!! I watched game number one, three weeks ago and was sorely dissapointed when we lost. It WAS a great game, but we went down in the final minutes… And I missed this game… Damn….
I can tell you now, I WILL NOT MISS THE NEXT ONE!!! I’ll be home (in Phuket) and we’ll be backing the blues all the way!
Come and join me…
Petronas Towers
It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with this site, and maybe it’s about time to start doing something again. I’ve been overseas a lot lately, currently lying in my bed, in KL, Malaysia debating on going shopping. No, I don’t live here, I’m just a tourist. Debating on having a shower and visiting MegaMall in Mid Valley. I went there some years ago and was amazed, preparing to be amazed again, and have my wife spend all my money… After all, isn’t that what they’re for???
I spend most of my time now in Thailand and Australia. Debating on which I call home. Often I get trapped and call both home, but there are moments where I take sides, in which case it’s “Back in Australia… but here at home….” and other times, it’s “When I’m at home…” clearly referring to the other country. One thing that is funny, is visiting your own country as a tourist. Ok, admittedly it’s probably not quite the same as a tourist, because you’ve probably got accommodation, transport (or a transport system you know), no language barriers and communications (email, telephone etc etc).
But going to Australia for short stints, is kind of like a holiday. And like all holidays, they have their good points and bad points.
The Rum Jungle Bar, KL
Regardless, I’m heading off to Singapore in a few days, ready to hit a few attractions that I didn’t get to see in either of my last two trips. But for now, I’ll just sit here, and slowly wake my wife (she get’s grumpy if I just push her out of bed lol), and debate the day’s (and the night’s) activities… Tonight could see me at a favourite little haunt called the Rum Jungle (free plug), they’re just around the corner from the towers (pictured above). But I have found a new little bar at the moment (only because of the price of the drinks).
I’ve never drunk “Carlsberg” beer before, it’s from Copenhagen and it’s not too bad a drop. I’m a Tiger (Singapore) and Chang (Thailand) beer drinker myself (or a Wild Turkey man when I’m at home/in Australia!)… But this bar I found has RM30 (about 300฿ or A$9) for the first stubbie (which is definitely overpriced…), BUT every one AFTER that is just RM1!!! (about 10฿ or just A$0.31)… If over the course of the CRAZY HOURS (as they call them), you put away 11 of these (to make the math easy lol), that’s 11 stubbies for RM40 or 400฿ or A$12.30… breaking that down… each stubbie costs RM3.6, 36฿, or A$1.12… Now that’s good by anyone’s standards. I just have to get the wife there again tonight!!!!
But who want’s to hear about beer…
Prior Preparation and Planning Prevent Piss Poor Performance
I first travelled to Singapore in 2008 with a good friend of mine. While we were there we darted off to KL for a few days and took in some of the local sights, as well as attractions (there is a hidden pun there – sorry, private jokes are so bad, but if anyone knows Sissy, you’d know what I mean!) Anyway, we elected to go by VIP bus. We had heard about how good it was, and cheap, and so we did it. Without a lot of research, we jumped on one of the services (the name has seriously escaped the pair of us) and we were dropped off in some dingy bus terminal/car park with hordes of teksis (how Malaysian’s spell taxi) who were unwilling to run their meters for us.
So we elected to walk.
It was hot, uphill, long and we were dragging our luggage along for the ride. Did I mention it was hot?
We stayed at a hotel, Corus, pretty much across the road from the Petronas Towers. Not bad at the time, cheap, free wifi in their lobby (BTW they don’t have this any more), and not too bad. Especially for the price. The bad point was though, that another bus company ran VIP busses TO THE DOOR!!!
It’s now 2011.
I had forgotten a lot of the lessons learned in 2008 – especially the difficulty in organising and coordinating international travel between countries, that aren’t your home country, and that (despite official languages) don’t speak great EngRish). When I decided to visit KL with my wife I did look briefly at the Corus hotel, but quickly dismissed it for some reason (it wasn’t the wifi!), and went with the Novatel. Now this is no dig on the Novatel, they are a good Hotel and I would recommend them again, Well, we’re still here and haven’t had any problems so far. BUT, and here’s where the 7 P’s come into it… When it came to organising the bus (long after I had BOOKED the accommodation), I booked with the bus company that dropped us off at the Corus Hotel. But the Novatel is closer to the car park/bus station that Andrew and I had taken in 2008!
Is that irony?
No, it’s just those 7 bloody damn P’s
Apple now itemises the changes in their terms and conditions without you having to read them all… At least this is what I discovered today… At the top of the page (while logged in using a MBP) I saw a list of changes to the T&C… Better than reading 100+ pages of same!
mosquito
I’ve had Dengue Fever for the last month, I’m only just getting over it. I hope I get over it soon, I’ll be in Singapore next week!
It’s been a debilitating disease, it put me in hospital for 5 days and that was no fun – not without insurance! I have been crook with this for more than a month…
It is purely mosquito driven, and non contagious, and there are four main strains of the disease. I caught one of them (I don’t know which one), but now I am immune from catching it again, the other three strains I am immune for a (unspecified) “period”… The problem is AFTER that period, I am MORE at risk if I ever do catch one of them…
I was VERY lucky, I never caught it (or got the worst strain) as detailed in the above link… But it still hurt though!
Great.
edit: this was written at a time when I was spending a LOT of time in country Thailand… and I mean BACK COUNTRY!!!
For example, and as has recently happened to me, I went searching for an app I had previously bought, to reinstall because frankly I got tired of it and I wanting to give it another go. I went to reinstall it. Now I wasn’t at home, so resyncing wasn’t an option.
I found the app, and there is no ‘reinstall’ button, you have no choice but to re-’buy’ it. I don’t want to buy it, I’ve already bought it. I just want to reinstall it. But to do so, I have to go through the motions of buying it again.
I click INSTALL and then BUY and AppStore quits (I hate this too, let me queue things and buy/install/update multiple items), and moments later I get a message box telling me I won’t be billed for this. I am being warned about NOT being charged… Cool… NOT
But on this occasion, I WAS charged and I don’t have the option to back-out, because (after all) I had selected to BUY IT.
After some research I discovered I actually had TWO iTunes accounts, one being my email address and the other simply my username (sans ‘@myemail.com’). How this occurred I will never know, but when I wrote to apple about this they just maintained I had bought it via two accounts and had no recourse. If I was presented with a last minute ‘You’re about to be charged for this’ message box, I would have kindly not purchased it and found out about the 2 accounts. Instead, I just get billed twice.
Now I know not everyone would want this, and some people would find it annoying, but there can be an option to turn this off (or on, as the case might be).
Feedback to apple submitted this date
What ticks me off about this:
Imagine if you bought a car and once a week or at some random time, you got into the car and turned on the ignition and your car speaks to you, “sorry, the terms and conditions of you using this vehicle have changed, please accept this new 101 page agreement before I let you start it!” But to make matters worse, you’d have to go back inside your house to accept them! (after all it does throw me out of the app store and I have to restart what it is I was doing)
Seriously, take it for granted I accepted your old terms and conditions, just show me what’s changed! Don’t make me read EVERYTHING, because as we all know, that’s not going to happen.
I’m sorry, I do love grApple, but I seriously hate them too!
I’ve never used them, and saw an article today about them.. So I thought I’d give them a go. I looked them up, there’s a ton of them!!! Massive amounts of keyboard shortcuts to do almost everything in gmail…
Let’s try it… G then S
nope, didn’t work…
Tried playing around a bit, different interfaces, checked settings and found they were disabled. I enabled them, went back to the inbox, pressed G then A (to go to ALL MAIL folder…)
Nothing happened…
Tried J and K which is supposed to move the cursor up and down… Still didn’t happen… Couldn’t figure it out…. I’m in Chrome, I’m on a mac running OS X. Should work… (one would think)…
I opened my mail in firefox and it all works like a charm.
I’ve been playing with them for a short time, not bad… Handy.
What is strange however, gmail shortcut keys don’t work in their own google browser (Chrome), maybe this is OS X specific, I don’t know, but it’s a bit of a bummer!
Here’s a link to google help with a list of existing shortcut keys:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594
So, I bought the iPad a few days ago and doing my first post using the WordPress application designed specifically for the iPad. There is also an iPhone version which I have used before and it is pretty good too.
This app seems to have it all, I’ll look more closely at it over the next few days.
What do I like about the iPad?
Well for starters it has made me remember some features of the phone that I had forgotten about. There is the nice addition of 4 punctuation symbols accessed through two keys on the bottom right. The feature I had forgotten about is tap/dragging where you tap the modifier key and then drag to the desired key and release. Works great on the ‘?’ and the ‘!’. But it also works great on other punctuation when you only want one followed by an alpha character. Such as when you type an open bracket (such as this).
Surprisingly the keyboard’s lack of tactile-ness doesn’t REALLY seem to be an issue. There is the quickest of learning curves, but it doesn’t seem to last long. The iOS error correction seems to pickup some (or most as the case may be) mistakes and it’s pretty good – in landscape mode. The portrait keyboard is simply too small and I often opt for the landscape one. But you get use to it. If you persist with the portrait keyboard, then going back to landscape the keyboard is massive and takes almost half the screen.
Moving on from the keyboard, when you get an app that’s specifically designed for the iPad, it is very sweet. Just about everything apple has a new and welcomed interface. Some could be better, but overall, pretty good. The speed over the iPhone is pretty good too.
Youtube has a great interface, which really I wish youtube would bring to their website. Some of the games for the device are simply awesome, and the apps are great too. I did purchase Numbers and Pages for the iPad and their flexibility is great. Numbers even brings a minor addition over the OS-X version in that it auto freezes the first column and row in the table. Something you just cant do in the desktop version.
Anyway, I think this device is really a whole new paradigm in computing and interfaces. Now if only I just didn’t have to touch the screen at all!
