I thought my mouse cursor wasn’t moving. It was a fly… I obviously need glasses on to operate a computer!
I picked up my motorbike on Saturday. It sounds very different to before, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing…
They had listed on the job card “$500.00 in ‘honda parts’”… I quizzed them on this and they said that the parts list was a mile long and they just summed it up in one line so it wasn’t pages and pages of invoice. I asked to see the parts list and they refused me. They claimed it was a lucky co-incidence that it came to exactly $500 in parts which seems rather unlikely to me but the bike is running again which is a HUGE improvement from before.
I also seem to have fixed the MX5 electrical problems. I fixed it by returning the $220 Federal battery to the shop I bought it from and putting back in the old dodgy cheapo battery that is of much lower capacity. Car runs fine now and hasn’t had any issues with electricity after driving all over town.
Battery shop said they needed to send the Federal away for testing because the problem could be caused by my car.
After a night on the charger I checked out my $200 Federal battery and found it was only 11.53 volts. Straight after a full charge in my experience lead acid batteries hover around 13 volts.
I called up about my motorbike yesterday afternoon and was told that it would now be put off another day because they were waiting upon a gasket, (for the third day in a row) and it would deffinately be finished (for the third day in a row) by the followingafternoon.
I’m sitting in my cubicle cube by myself today. Everyone else has called in sick apparently. After a whole rash of work prior to 10am it’s been relatively quiet today and I’m just biding my time until lunch.
Nothing makes the day go slower than a slow day in the office but I can live in hope that there will be a heap more work later this afternoon to make the time fly by.
Last night I saw an iphone in the flesh for the first time and it was better than I imagined. I was particularly impressed with the graphical interface for displaying sms messages whereby messages from the same contact are displayed in speech bubbles down the screen like a chat program so you can read it like a conversation. It was a simple thing but it was an interface feature that made the device feel welcoming and of a high quality.
I’m sure the iPhone is still big news for most of the world but they’re still not officially for sale in Australia and whilst I know of people who have them I hadn’t had the opportunity to see one firsthand.
If I do end up going to europe I may consider buying one over there, but it would depend on how long I planned to spend there.
This was a big week. I hope to make something of myself at this new company.
I’m so tired this morning, I barely made it up before 6am and I have to leave in a second to catch my train.
I’m really looking forward to the weekend.
Today I thought I would try bringing in the eeepc to work on the train as a side by side comparison with travelling with the 15.4” macbook pro.
Despite being half of the weight of the Apple it wasn’t noticably lighter but it felt less awkward since the eeepc can basically fit entirely in the palm of my super-sized hands.
For pure writing efficiency the keyboard works ok but with large hands comes great large fingertips so I need to be super accurate to avoid hitting two keys at the same time.
As part of this trial I am investigating how long the battery lasts when using low screen brightness, no wifi, no multimedia but sleeping when I’m actively doing work instead of being shutdown and being reaonably used for typing and editing.
With the MBP (admittedly I don’t use it all day long because I’m at work) I regularly get 6 hours from the battery whilst purely writing on a low screen brightness and I’m interested to see how long the eeepc can go in similar conditions. In my previous experience the MBP has much more advanced battery management and when asleep it barely consumes power compared to the eeepc which can easily run flat over the course of a day.
pause
I have to say it’s not the fastest machine to resume from sleep. Especially considering that the machine is completely solid state. The small screen is big enough to type on but I would be really interested in seeing the new model that has the bigger screen.
I feel like I’ve influenced so many people to get eeepc’s. Though being so cheap and small it’s an extremely easy sell. I think I’ve influenced the purchase of at least 5 eeepc’s in my circle of friends but the I also find strangers recommending the machine to me randomly all over town. I suspect they’ve been a raging sales success for Asus, I just hope they’re making enough money per unit to make it a profitable exercise.
Most sub-notebook machines are extremely expensive and whilst this isn’t exactly full featured it really has stand out performance for the size and price. It’s exciting thinking of what the future holds for tiny computers. 
I would possibly consider getting a macbbook air but it’s too large and far too expensive for a machine that would only be used when I
‘m out and about.
Called the motorbike shop again this morning and they promised the work would be completed by this afternoon. I’ve heard this story for a while now. It’s been about three months since I’ve had the motorcycle in my posession.
Two hours into my working day, another quiet time.
The eeepc has been sitting on sleep for quite a while and the battery life has dropped to 90%. We won’t really know how it’s going for sure until the end of the day and I can see whether it’s gone the distance on battery power alone.
I’ve noticed that when people have an important meeting they seem to randomly start calling ‘IT’ from the phonebook regardless of whether the team they call can actually physically assist them with their problem,
Just got a call requesting to be transferred to someone else.
Just whenever I start typing work comes in, must be because I’m at work. 
In the quiet times though it can be really really quiet. Really depends on the day.
3 hours into the day battery is on 80%
6 hours in (mostly on standby) the battery is at 60%. I’ve been pretty busy and I haven’t had a chance to write much over the last few hours. Ineresting that the battery has gone down 20% whilst on standby.
I never checked the battery again.
Tonight I was supposed to attend a going away dinner for a friend. Unfortunately I arranged to pick up the friend in my ill fated MX5 which drained the battery flat on the way there.
He came to me and picked me up (and the dead $200 battery) we went to the dinner (and they wouldn’t serve us due to a mix up over the times) so we had pizza down thee street at another place. Much later three of us drove back to the Mx5 via my house to collect my old dead cheap battery and managed to get some attention of passing cars by playing loud 80’s music.
In the rain and dark I fitted the old really cheap battery in and on the first attempt the MX5 roared into life, all electrics working fine and continued to be fine for the 30 minute drive home in the rain.
I suspect the old cheap dying battery still has more life than the 2 week old ‘made in the USA’ $200 battery but until I get a multimeter on the car I can’t really tell.
It’s late, time to get some sleep.
In many ways I wish I was going to Europe as well with my many friends.
This week I made the decision that I really ought to be writing more often. If I did have any regular readers I’m sure I’ve lost you all now through my lack of regularity.
The truth of the matter is I’ve been so busy over the last month or so that I haven’t had the time nor the inclination to write much unfortunately. There has been quite a few big changes in my life and I’ve undertaken activities that take up alot of my free time outside of work, and I’ve not at the break time at work to fill you in on what has been happening.
I’ve recently changed jobs. I now work in the city, but I have to get up very early in order to make the train (5:30am or so) but when I get home from work I’ve been actively trying to catch up with friends, building my MX5 (which with the significant help of others was completed in around two weeks), playing world of warcraft and trying to catch up on a million other things around my new house that are asking for my attention.
All in all I’m loving life and I’ve taken on a wide range of activities that is seeing me regularly busy. I’ve even started riding my mountain bike again so hopefully I’ll be getting fit again soon!
I’ve been unsuccessful in getting my VTR1000 repaired. The shop that has my motorbike has been extremely slow and after several months they still keep promising the repairs will be finished by ‘the end of the week’.
Owning a motorbike over these last 10 years has been my crutch of avoiding having to queue for public transport and paying for parking. It’s been a real shock to my system to have to add so much time to my travel times and to pay over $50 for two days parking at the cheapest rate in the CBD. At the moment I feel like I’m working to pay for my parking. Even the train ticket is double my weekly motorcycle fuel bill and I have to allow an extra hour for travel times.
I’m hoping that I’ll be getting back the motorcycle soon and I’ll be able to travel cheaply, efficiently and according to my own schedule again soon. Another avenue I am considering is riding my bicycle to work, but that will depend on the suitability of bicycle storage facilities at work as well as making the sacrifice of an hour per day each way for travelling. If my work hours directly matched the train timetable it would obviously be the easiest solution for getting to work, but unfortunately getting to work on the train means either arriving 40 minutes early or 5 minutes late every day.
From my new desk I have a view out over the city including the clock tower on the town hall. Every fifteen minutes the clock chimes and for some reason or the other it makes me smile.
This new workplace has a fairly fast buzz about it, and the workload seems to come in fairly thick and fast, but for the most part it’s a positive workplace and the people here make it a very enjoyable place to be despite the workload.
I hope to take some pictures of my MX5 soon and I’ll place the up here as I’ve had several requests. It’s not the prettiest example around but I’m very proud of what came together nonetheless.
Something I’ve noticed from my newest workplace is that every workplace were there is a significant number of people, you start to run into similar people in each workplace. I hope this isn’t offensive to anyone but in a way it almost seems like there is a workplace template where colleagues are stamped out of a workplace machine but due to the manufacturing process there are key differences from workplace to workplace but the individuals possibly came off the same production line. I can only guess why this effect doesn’t occur in smaller workplaces is because there isn’t a large enough sample size for similarities to be seen.
For some unknown reason, every time I work on my car or a computer recently I manage to give myself tiny cuts that are no deeper than a paper-cut but they bleed everywhere. Very unpleasant.
Speaking of cuts – on the weekend I started getting back into mountain biking again after at least 6 months of inactivity. After I got back from China I haven’t ridden enough to maintain my level of fitness and as result the ride was quite tiring for me. One one particular climb I was coming around a tight corner on wet clay, my legs were burning and I just didn’t think I’d have the energy to complete the climb, so I attempted to click my left foot out of my pedal. Unfortunately all I managed to do was throw myself off balance – I became stationary and fell sideways into the lantana that was growing thickly along the side of the path. I joked to the next rider that I was doing my part for the environment by beating down weeds using my body. I wasn’t significantly hurt but bruised my wrist slightly and gave myself tiny itchy scratches up my arms and legs. It’s not the first time I’ve fallen from my mountain bike due to my lack of co-ordination with clipless pedals and it probably won’t be the last.
I’m currently using Crank Bros Acid pedals and I find them much more comfortable to ride with than my previous Shimano pedals because they have much more float for my knees with the added benefit that they’re also much lighter.
Despite having an eeepc I’ve recently taken to carrying my much much larger Macbook Pro with me everywhere I go. It doesn’t really make alot of sense to carry the much larger laptop just to do some writing so I might wise up soon and start carrying the smaller cheaper one around with me to do my writings. It does seem a pity to have such a nice laptop and not take it everywhere with me though. I have to say this Apple laptop is possibly the nicest (not the most powerful) machine that I’ve ever been fortunate to use. I find the interface somehow relaxing and when I’m trying to be productive I find myself far less distracted than if I was using another operating system.
Obviously there is the Macbook Air which is also both small, portable and lightweight but unfortunately it’s not even remotely in my pricerange and I can’t justify buying any more computers. I’ll just have to find a way to take the MBP everywhere I go. With the excellent 6+ hour battery life it’s not hard to justify using the MBP as my daily laptop.
Something caught my eye on the way home tonight. A woman on the back of a very small motorcycle with exposed pale white, cellulite pitted legs that were considerably greater in size than my own chest (and that’s saying something). I would have thought that if I placed my own 110kg on a CBR250RR the suspension would be sorely pressed, I can only imagine with the two of them it must have been running along at the bottom of its travel! They seemed to be getting along ok in traffic and I think it’s great they were commuting on a motorbike.
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