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I left Sydney on Thursday at 1115 in the morning and arrived in Victoria at approximately 1000 on Thursday morning. How’s that for time travel? Of course, I hadn’t slept for roughly a day, so to take advantage of my “extra time,” I’ve been sleeping for most of the last two days.

Had a great time in Australia and I’ll probably go back. Hopefully in the next week I’ll post more about what I did and what I thought of Australia from a Canadian perspective.

Now that I’m back, I’ve started to catch up on the blogs that I read. From day to day, it seems like I can never keep up with all the posts, but after three weeks, I’m surprised how few posts there actually are. It’s also nice to miss some time because the people that don’t post often have a bit of a back log. The feature in RSS Bandit to “Mark All Posts As Read” is a godsend. Didn’t see as many resolution posts as I thought. I’ll have one of those soon, now that my year is starting three weeks late. 🙂

After a whirlwind trip through Hobart, Melbourne and Byron Bay, we’re back in Sydney for the reason we’re here: the wedding.

It’s been really great here. This place is sort of a Bizarro-Canada: you go up in a plane and come down to the same place but in a parallel universe. The good things about Canada are here, but some of the bad things in Canada aren’t. Australia is very clean: even in Sydney, a city of six million, there is virtually no litter or smog. I thought Victoria’s harbour was beautiful, but it’s nothing compared to Sydney’s.

I’ll have more to say when I have more time. I’m off to enjoy the 32 degree weather. (I hear there’s snow in Victoria now. Ha Ha)

I don’t have a lot of time to write, but I figured I’d post something to get the numbers for January up. December was super busy, hence the few posts. Xmas was quiet and good. I’m now in Australia for a vacation and a wedding.

I’ve been here since the 2nd, even though I left on the 31st of December. Time gets funny around the dateline. We’ve been to Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, and we’re now in Melbourne before we head up to Byron Bay (everyone’s favourite here), and then, finally, Sydney for the wedding and hanging out.

 

This kind of surprised me, but I’m now a Tablet owner. Yay! We went to the Future Shop (kind of like a Canadian Best Buy, even though I see, after searching for this post, that Best Buy is now in Canada) Friends and Family night: a night of CRAZY savings for special customers. The criteria for being a special customer is having a heartbeat. 

I was looking around at the computer stuff, not to buy necessarily, when I laid my eyes on a sweet Tablet deal: a tablet for under CAD$2000 (~ $200 US (even though the US dollar is so bad)) plus the 7% discount, plus don’t pay for 12 months. The only bad part is that it’s from a company I have never heard of: Averatec. It was an impulse buy, but since I was planning on getting one within the year, I figured why not; the specs were nothing to sneeze at, and it’s a tablet. I’ve been wanting one ever since they’ve been announced. It also has the distinction of being my first notebook computer.

I brought it home, opened it up, turned it on. I’ve custom built all my machines for the past five years, so I forgot how much a pain in the ass pre-built machines can be. There is a ton of crap software on it by default; it only had Tablet PC edition 2003; and OneNote wouldn’t upgrade to SP1. The CDs they came with are all encrypted Ghost files. So I can’t even re-pave it. I called tech support to solve the OneNote issue: they told me to download the trial version from Microsoft, and then put in my product key. Riiiiight. Why don’t you just include the CD with the product then? Can I do that with the OS? No? Idiots. Anyway, despite my gripes, I like the machine and don’t regret the purchase. Next time I get one, I’ll do what I was planning to do with this one: go with a reputable company. 

Now I just have to think of something to do with it. 🙂 I have VS on it, and a few ideas…

Any recommendations? (Developer tools or cool apps)

I have to get this out before the beauty of the game makes me completely forget about it.

I recently celebrated my 26th birthday and got Half-Life 2 as a gift (thanks Mom). I was pretty jazzed about the game because it got so many great reviews and I was pretty disappointed with Doom 3; so disappointed that I traded it in before I finished it. So I install the game: it’s 5 CDs worth of content, but that’s normal these days, so no big deal; it still takes about 5 – 10 minutes to install, but that’s big-budget games for you. The thing that really made me fume is this Steam bullshit. The installer installs the files encrypted and you have to go out on the internet; register with Steam and then it’ll spend 5 minutes authenticating and another 10 minutes decrypting the files on your own computer (actually from what I hear, that’s a decent time; some people I’ve spoken to since had to wait hours), after you bought the fucking thing from the store! Sure, games are big budget and you have to protect your investment, blah, blah, blah. But this is ridiculous: you’re punishing paying customers! Assholes. Is piracy really that rampant, Valve? The first game is still on the shelves in stores! And then that Steam shit sits on your machine running in the background (with a ~70MB working set, that ain’t tiny). Do you want Steam to start when Windows starts? Um, no.

But like  I said at the beginning, the game is making me forget this inconvenience. The graphics are the most beautiful I’ve seen in a video game (the characters lips move with the words they’re saying!). The sound is also second-to-none. I have no idea about the story, because I don’t think I’m very far into it, but the environment they create: very realistic, very detailed. Valve has done great work here. Too bad they wreck it at the start.