dready blog v2.0

Caught it two days ago when I lost some sleep over an assignment, I hate essays.

Tiff and her mother has just left for Melbourne, so I’m home alone. Well.. except for this:

Once again, I found myself the victim of the never-ending CityRail trackwork. At the peak of my anger, I wanted to blog out my frustrations. So I whipped out my new phone and tried to use WAP to log on to my bBlog admin area to post an entry. After 2 guesses of the URL and 3 wrong password attempts, I finally got in. All these took an unbearably long time, mind you. After all that, I realized that I just couldn’t submit the post due to some URL error, there goes the text I so painstakingly entered using the numeric keypad (the “smart” input method on the LG phone didn’t help either).

Speaking of phone and WAP, after using the Nokia 3210 for about 5 years, Tiff & I decided to sign up for Orange and get a new handset each for a shared bill of $45 a month on a 2 years contract. As part of the offer, we get to call each other for five minutes free all day long.

After a long period of 56K modem, we’re finally up and running with the Optus ADSL service. A broadband price war is going on here in Australia. Yes, it’s a bit slow, I know. But that’s the way it is down below. (sorry, can’t help it!)

The reason why it took us so long is many fold: first we had to wait 2 weeks for our phone line to be activated, then another week for the ADSL to be activated on the line and for the modem to arrive. Then we had to miss the courier who delivers our ADSL modem thrice, first two times because our intercom was faulty so we couldn’t hear him, and the third because the courier company screwed up. Arse luck.

When we finally do get it, we often get dropped out of the network due to “an unexpected outage”, or so I was told by the technical support guy after holding for an hour.

Just a glimpse of the crap I have to deal with sometimes. It’s not all bad though, we’re making progress, at least the real estate agent got the door bell fixed

I don’t miss dialup at all.

The other day I decided to buy some Lebanese bread (Guildford being a Lebanese town, these are dirt cheap here) and make myself some kebabs. So I chopped some garlic, onion and tomatoes, cheese, a fat sausage, sprinkled them on a round lebanese bread and put it under the grill. Went to brush up, came back and found thick smoke coming out of the oven. Here’s the result after salvaging the stuffing:

Take a closer look…

I learnt that:

1. The oven is pretty powerful.
2. Never leave the grill unattended.
3. Lebanese bread burns easily.
4. It’s better to buy kebabs from downstairs.

Life’s too good and I find myself playing nethack again. First I tried looking for it in my FreeBSD VM, I thought they used to distribute it in the default installation… nevermind I found Rogue and was playing it for a while. Then I went to download the windows version of nethack so I can play it without having to fire up VMWare.

I’m now using the IBMGraphics option, which looks pretty darn good! I’ve also managed to get PuTTy to display the IBM line drawing characters properly by going to the “Translation” item, select “CP437″ under Character set translation and select “Use font in both ANSI and OEM modes”. Also, I needed to use “Courier New” or “Lucida Console” fonts with the “Central European” script to make it look right.

.. after a long period of silence. During this time, Bubble has flown back to Singapore, and we have settled into our new rented apartment in Guildford. Today, the technician finally came to install our phone line and we can get on the Internet via 56k modem! Being offline for 2 weeks is utterly painful, but at the same time kind of therapeutic. I almost failed the online course for not participating for too long.

We snapped some photos of the new place, will post them up once they are developed. Getting used to Guildford and the surrounding areas. We are quite far from the Sydney city centre by the standards of most international students, but we have Parramatta, which is only two stations away.

Moving time. V busy. Go away.

Tried out both YahooPOPs 0.5 and MrPostman to download my mails to my Mozilla Mail. After much difficulties, I finally managed to do it, and have decided to stick to MrPostman.

My experience with YahooPOPs was less than satisfactory (due in part to the fact that I tried to download 1000 messages all at once and the speed of download seems to have triggered a temporary block from Yahoo, giving me corrupted messages), so I moved on in search of a better alternative.

At first, I refused to try MrPostman based purely on the fact that it is a Java app. To this end, I must applaud the MrPostman team for making the installation so seamless - it’s a true-blue installer, no need to copy the Jar file somewhere and setup your own ugly shortcut to run java on it! It feels almost like a native Windows app.

Going to Brahma Kumaris on tomorrow night again, for Raja Yoga part II this time. Ever since we came back from part I and practised its meditation techniques, Tiff and I have found it highly beneficial to our well-being. Some of the benefits are that it gets us through a hectic day without getting worked up, gives us a clearer mind and generally connect with others with better vibes.

Because of this, I’m going to try to wrap up all the work I have to do by tomorrow so I can have a real retreat.

Email Vault is a program that works with Mozilla Mail client to store your mails into a relational database (Postgres) and file your mails under multiple categories instead of folders (without duplicating the message).

Incidentally, some months ago I did conceive an idea to create an email consolidator and scribbled some notes on my trusty old sketch pad. Guess what I called it? Mail Vault!! I never really thought about using an SQL database, but there was a requirement to have a super-efficient backend mail store (not excluding the possibility of an SQL DB). The main goal Mail Vault is to import all your mails from various sources (mbox on a unix account, yahoo mail, outlook express mails, etc.), at the same time removing the duplicates. It would also have a super-intuitive interface (yet to be defined that allows you to perform complex query on your mails. But I didn’t get round to persuing it.

Later on, I found Zoe, which sort of does what I wanted to do. I tried to use it but it didn’t work out. Maybe I should give it another try.