This past weekend has been a weekend full of a great deal of WIN! for me. I managed to tick a lot off things off of my to-do list that I’ve been sitting on for ages.

One of them, upgrading my website and Wordpress to the latest version, was something I’ve been meaning to do for some time.

The upgrade was relatively painless and even fixed up the odd problem I was having with the weather plugin (it used to come up with all sorts of odd error messages that it couldn’t find certain functions or something).

On other news, I am part of the Twitter365 project on Flickr – To participate in the project, you take a photo each day for 365 days. There are ceratinly some GREAT photos that have been taken already as part of the project – mine do seem to be quite ‘ordinary’ but I’m participating, and thats the important thing! Granted, I’m using the crappy forward-facing camera in my phone which is very low quality – In fact, I used my normal 5 megapixel camera to take one head-shot of myself, and resolved to going back to the low quality phone camera after it showed up far too much detail LOL

Anyways – I’m at work at the moment, and its almost 9:00am where things will start to kick-off for the day, so I’ll wrap this up here.

I won’t promise, but I’ll TRY to make more regular posts on here – I’ll do my best!

TTFN!

Now – on to the subject of this post – and I will warn you in advance that it is a venting of anger on my part – so if you’re easily offended, have a weak constitution or have some sort of medical complaint – then please continue reading as you’ll be the first to die in preparation for the final solution.

On the weekend just passed, I had a very good friend of mine travel 12 hours by train to come and spend some time with me.  We had a great weekend, lots of fun, and then he departed on Sunday for another 12 hour train ride back to Lismore where he is studying.

He was due to arrive at some rediculous hour of the morning on Monday, so I left it until Monday evening to call him to make sure he got home OK.

This is moment at which my belief that Homosapiens as a species should be extinguished, was born.

My friend tells me that whilst he is on the train ride home, he falls asleep for a couple of hours.  Nothing wrong with that I think, perfectly understandable – we did have a big weekend.  He wakes up at his destination, and goes to collect his bag, which he had placed directly above him in the overhead storage.

You should be able to work out where this is going by now…  Yes, it was gone.  No sign of it.  It would appear that someone had taken it and got off at a previous station, all while my friend dozed.

So, my friend has lost most of his life – Laptop, Personal data, uni work, wallet, money, licence – basically everything but the clothes on his back.

Of course, he reports it to station security and police – but is politely told he’ll never see his stuff again.

This is the point where I say to myself “Why can’t these people, who are paid to help in such instances, be bothered to do anything”.  *EVERY* platform at *EVERY* train station is monitored 24/7 with video cameras and this is recorded for use in exactly this sort of situation.  All they have to do is check 2 minutes of video from each of the stations after my friend fell asleep to see someone getting off the train with his bag.  Then they just have to check the ticketing database, as each ticket has a name and phone number attached to it.

But they just can’t be bothered.

You may think that this one isolated incident is hardly cause for the extermination of Homosapiens, but that was the icing on the cake, and its what got me thinking.

Globally, the planet is falling apart. Crime is on the increase. Wars are breaking out.

Homosapiens have had 10,000 years – With the population at current levels, the gene pool is capable of faster change – Its time for the next step.  Its time for change.  Its time to fix this mess.

Homosuperior – A Better World By Better People.

Something dark, elusive

It has a shape and form, but it’s not clear

It knows my name

Its calling for me, beconing me closer

I can’t see what it is

I don’t know what it wants

I’m scared

I have been using Trillian for a VERY long time – something in the order of 8+ years.

Its has its limitations and problems, for example, it hasn’t supported audio and video chats (not that I use these all that often) and for some reason its always had issues when trying to send or receive files.

I have also had the honor of being an Alpha Tester of the yet-to-be-released Trillian Astra (which does support audio, video etc. as well as a grand list of other features – most of which I don’t use)

About a week ago, my PC had a ‘hiccup’ (well, someone accidentally kicked over the external SATA drive attached to the PC and pulled out the cable) which required a restart.  On returning from the restart, Trillian opened with no contacts in the list, and none of my settings.

Ordinarily, this isn’t much of an issue.  Trillian uses INI files for its configuration rather than add too many entries into the windows registry, and simply overwriting the INI files with backed-up versions usually resolves any problems.

I was fortunate enough to have made a backup of the entire Trillian data and program folders just the day before, so I restored these to their original locations.  But alas, still nothing in the contacts list, and my account configuration was marked as ‘inactive’.  No matter how much fiddling about I did, I just couldn’t get it working again – at one stage I managed to get all my contacts back up, but every one of them was marked as ‘Orphaned’ (meaning it wasn’t attached to an account.

So – after all these years of loyalty, I have decided I am now finished with it.  The new Trillian Astra has been in Alpha Testing phase for over 2 years now, and shows no sign of even going Beta any time soon.

After a little looking about, I have decided to give Pidgin a try.

Pidgin is a much the same as Trillian – a multi-flavour IM client.  Its also Open Source, which is an extra bonus point for it too.

I have been playing around with it now for a few hours, and I have found a few good and bad points about it so far:

First thing to go was the sounds – Not so much a criticism, but with the amount of people I have in my contacts list, the constant coming-and-going led to a continual soundtrack

The interface is very…Bland – I’m sure its just that I’m used to Trillian’s interface, but Pidgin’s interface is very lacklustre with no prettyness at all – I’m sure its something I’ll get used to.

It doesn’t have System Tray pop-up notifications – This may be an option somewhere I’m missing, but I would like the little pop-ups when people come online the same as Windows Live Messenger does.

The chat window favicons are the buddy icons of the contact – I LOVE this feature, it helps to identify who you’re chatting to in the task bar without having to hover, or open the chat window

Anyways – I’m sure there’s a lot more for me to learn about the new member of my application family, and I shall endeavour to keep you all posted.

For now, I have a big task ahead of me – I have to now go through all of the old Trillian logs, and update all of my contacts names to be what I had them set to in Trillian – this is going to be an epic task…

<sigh>

Its nearing 3 years I’ve had my braces on, and NEVER in all that time have I experienced mind-numbing pain like I have in the past week.

Due to the length of time I’ve had them on, the Orthodontist decided to try an experimental wire, hideously expensive as I understand, but supposed to be extremely flexible and almost unbreakable.  I’m well known for breaking the wires in my braces on a more-than-regular basis, so anything that can resist my iron jaw is welcome.

However, my teeth are/were in a ‘transitional’ state, where a massive amount of movement was required before my bite would align again.  For some reason, it was just the right combination of pulling and pushing that made my head feel like it was about to cave in.

But anyways – that’s all over now, and I’m back to my cheery self again!

But I do have an excuse

I’m now working full-time – the past couple of weeks have been extremely busy with interviews and what not, as well as getting myself up-to-speed in the new job.

For those of you scratching your heads going “What?  He never told me!” (and you know who you are) It wouldn’t hurt you to pick up the phone and call once in a while and rather than asking for something YOU want, ask about how *I* am going in general.  I have now come to the realisation that most of the people who call me are only looking for something they want, only only call when they want something – I *NEVER* get phone calls out of the blue from people just asking “How are you?  What have you been up to?”  It really is quite a sad state of affairs.

Anyway – I *PROMISE* (and I don’t have my fingers crossed behind my back – honest!) I will do another blog update over the weekend.

Until then – make sure you’re tuning in to Tech Wired Australia live on Saturday night 7:30 Eastern Australian Time for another exciting episode   Also make sure you check out the latest Aussie Tech Head podcast which should be out sometime later today, as I was part of the live broadcast of that after Tech Wired Australia on Wednesday night.  Another famous podcast due out over the weekend will be TechAU with Jason Cartwright – be sure to check his out with his High Definition video and all!

The podcast should be available as an audio download a little later on, but not sure about the video stream, as Ben’s upload speed is rather restrictive and uStream was having troubles catching up – but we’ll see.

On other ‘online media’ news, I happened across an email I received from Joost.  Now, I downloaded and installed Joost on my main PC around 6 months ago, and played around a bit with it then, but basically, its never been run since.  With the email, and a spot of free time on my hands, I thought I’d have another look at it.

I went to the website and downloaded the latest version, and while it was installing had a look around on their forums.  Ideally, I’d prefer a Media Centre version of it so I could run it on my Media PC that’s connected to the television.  However, this is not to be.  The only have 2 versions – one for PC and the other for Mac – and both of them are stand alone applications.  I can’t even navigate the software using the media centre remote control.

Basically, Joost is a rival to TV Tonic.  However, in my opinion, TV Tonic is the far superior product.  It has a stand alone application (although it only works with Internet Explorer – a browser independent version would be good) but more importantly, has a Media Centre plugin.

The Joost interface is clumsy and not very intuitive – it can only be navigated with a mouse, the channel icons are very oversized (they could better use the window real-estate to describe the channels in more detail) and the sorting and grouping of the channels is very haphazard.

The most annoying feature of Joost, is that it ONLY streams video live from their servers.  With TV Tonic, you select the channels you want, and it downloads them for you to watch whenever you like.  The TV Tonic service application also allows you to set time restrictions on when it can download as well as throttling the bandwidth it uses.  This is especially handy for people who havepeak and off-peak download restrictions where they can set the service to only download in off-peak hours.

All in all, I think until Joost offers a Media Centre plugin, and allows downloading/caching of its content, its a big ‘uninstall’ from me.

In other online media news – check out this Microsoft advert – it was made around 12 months ago, and I appear in it twice – look for my beady eyes peering out from on top of my monitor LOL!

Oh – and dont forget to have a look at the new page I’ve added – TV Shows I Watch

With my daylight hours being packed with interviews, and my evenings catching up on blogs, podcasts and my regular tv shows, its barely given me a chance to catch my breath!

Last night marked my debut in the podcasting community with me teaming up with Ben produce Tech Wired Australia.

We broadcast live video over uStream, and then an edited audio version put up on the Tech Wired Australia website.

Here are the links:
Recordeded Live on uStream
Downloadable edited Audio

I really enjoyed doing the podcast, and look forward to the next one on Saturday.  I’ll hopefully soon get into a good rhythm and not babble on so much LOL

I hope you all check out the podcast, and the other ones associated with The Secret Hub – and tune in again on Saturday for the next episode! Leave some comments and feedback too!

The big news, however, is that starting tonight I’ll be joining with Tech Wired Australia doing a live podcast.

Come and watch live:
Tech Wired Australia – Live every Wednesday and Saturday at 7:00pm (Australian Eastern Standard Time)

Hope you can make it!

I did do a live Vodcast on Ustream with Ben and Chris from Tech Wired Australia on Sunday evening – that was a lot of fun – apart from the fact the magnetic power cable for my MacBook kept popping off (and since the battery is dead, it was bye bye streaming).  Special thanks to Ben and Chris for the opportunity – hopefully some more in the near future!

Have just been having a couple of military helicopters buzzing the roof of my building – I expect they are doing exercises to prepare for the Pope’s impending visit for World Youth Day. I took a quick photo from my kitchen window as one zipped past – attached below.

The news last night had a story on the amount of traffic restrictions etc. that are going to be in place for the Pope’s visit – and its outrageous!  More than for APEC and The Olympics combined apparently.  As one wise woman on the news story pointed out “They should ask the public if we WANT these big events that impact our daily routines so much – I’m sure they’d find we DON’T want them” – a very accurate surmation in my opinion.  I just want to know who is PAYING for all of this?  Via a cheque marked “Coffers Of The Vatican”?  I think not.

On that note, I’ll proceed to pour half of my cup of coffee in my lap, to go along with the bowl of 2-minute noodles from lunch.  I seem to have the dropsies today