Andrew's Inner Sanctum

I generally know when I need to write a new blog post because my computer slows down. When I find an article on the internet that I think might be worth blogging about, I just leave the tab with that page open and start browsing in new tabs (I rarely restart my computer, only when updates require my system be restarted). Browser tabs are rather odd in that, the longer you keep them open, the more memory they start to consume, so after a couple of weeks of opening and closing different tabs and not actually closing the browser completely, it uses more and more memory. So I know it’s time to blog when my browser slows down telling me that I’ve probably kept a few too many tabs open for too long. So here’s some things I’ve found and my thoughts on them.

Learning OS X from a Windows User’s Experience

I found this article by Stephen Chapman on ZDNet which tells the experience of the author switching from Windows to Mac OS X. Apple in many of their ads say you should switch from a PC to a Mac and that it’s easy to do so, but the author of this article questions that. I have Mac OS X running on my Dell Inspiron 15R (n5110) as an experiment (mainly to keep myself up to date with what’s happening on the OS X side of the technology world and also to prove that your Mac isn’t anything more than a PC built with parts that OS X has exact drivers for) and I can tell you I’ve found some really weird behaviours that would confuse any user who had been using Windows for quite a while. The Green button with the plus (which is the approximate equivalent of the Maximise button in Windows) doesn’t actually make a screen take up as much space as it can in OS X like it does in Windows. In most apps it just stretches the window to a point where all the content is visible (such as the width of a webpage in Safari), but in other apps such as iTunes, it actually transforms the window into a mini player which is completely unexpected behaviour. In Windows the Maximise button always just makes the program fill up the entire screen from the top of your monitor to the top of the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. The only program I’ve found which breaks this rule is the Command Prompt, but you’re not going to find most regular users going in there. There are countless other things that I could list, but I’m not going to. My real point is, if you’re a Windows user who is used to the way Windows works, switching to a Mac isn’t something that is just “going to happen painlessly”, it’s going to be a bit difficult (just as the transition from OS X to Windows will be too) and this article reminds us of that truth.

 Two PC Industry Surprises In One Week!

This week we had 2 very surprising announcements during the week, both of which could possibly work in Microsoft’s favour. The first one occurred on Tuesday and this was Google announcing they were acquiring Motorola Mobility. There’s so much that can be said about this story, but the main point to get from this is why they decided to purchase Motorola Mobility: Patents! Google wants the 24,500 patents that Motorola Mobility has, so it can defend Android against Apple & Microsoft’s patent lawsuits. One of the most curious things that was noticed by a few bloggers was the page of quotes that Google put together listing all of it’s major partners and their apparent support of this acquisition. The quotes all sounded very similar as if they had all been written by the one person. So someone put together an Android Press Release Generator where you can make your own Press Release for this event. I think this is just brilliant.

The other big story was that only about 1 year after they acquired Palm for their WebOS software, HP announced that they were not only dumping all their WebOS products (which included Tablets & Smartphones) but that they’re looking to sell of their consumer PC business and switch to being an enterprise software services company and this includes acquiring a British company called Autonomy for $10 billion. HP essentially announced they want to follow the exact footsteps that IBM had taken many years ago (and there’s nothing particular wrong with that, IBM is a very successful company, it’s just nobody knows exactly what they do because they don’t produce consumer products). Although most people expected HP to give WebOS a little more time before making any decision about dumping it (the new HP Touchpad wasn’t doing very well in the market, but it had only been out less than a month or so), nobody expected HP to announce they wanted to exit the consumer PC business, especially since they’re the number 1 supplier of PCs in the world. There’s talk that Microsoft might buy HP’s consumer PC business so that they can produce Mac like systems that have completely integrated hardware and software (especially useful for tablets), but that’s unlikely I would think, although after the shock announcements of this week, anything could happen really!

Wow…

No, not the video game, I’m simply saying the word “wow…”. The ABC this week published an article on their news website titled: Most Australians duped by science fiction. This article went through to publish some quite amazing statistics of a number of different surveys that had been giving to many Australians about what conecpts in science fiction that they believed were true or not. One survey found that around 1/2 of the survey respondants thought that humans can be frozen and thawed back to life. Another survey found that 30% of the survey respondants thought that humans and dinosaurs coexisted on earth (a story that many religious organisations have spread because the discovery of the dinosaurs put a dent in their creation stories) and 1/4 thought the earth travelled all the way around the sun in just 1 day (despite it actually being 365 and 1/4 which is where the concept of ‘the year’ comes from). Apparently a similar survey last year found that 30% of respondants in the UK city of Birmingham thought that time travel was possible. Sometimes I just just shake my head and wonder

Interesting World War II Tactics

This week the ABC also published a story about some of the possible tactics the Allies came up with during World War II to try and beat the Nazis. One apparently was to have spies put the female hormone oestrogen into Hitler’s food to cause him to be less aggressive. Apparently others included dropping poisonous snakes onto Nazi soldiers and bombing them with glue to cause them to stick to the ground. I hope they mention some of these proposed (but never executed) tactics in history classes in the future, because they’re actually quite amusing.

Love You Brisbane

Growing up just east of Brisbane City here in Australia, I have a connection to this city and I know quite a lot about it (especially transport related as we’ll come to in a sec), but I didn’t know that it had it’s own song. The other morning when I was getting ready to go to University, my Mum was listening to Spencer Houson on 612 ABC Brisbane and I heard this song play with the lyrics “Love You Brisbane”. I found out that Brisbane actually has a song written about it, well nearly anyway. The song is actually a Jingle that Channel 7 wrote in the 1980s for Brisbane, and it was also used in Darwin & Perth too (with the word Brisbane replaced appropriately), although not to the same success as here in Brisbane. Regardless of its origins and purposes, I still think it’s pretty cool. You can watch it below.

Adelaide’s Southern Expressway

I went to Adelaide a couple of weeks ago and one of my favourite parts of the trip was driving down Adelaide’s Southern Expressway (M2). This road holds the record for being the world’s longest one-way reversible freeway, 24km of Expressway that can only be open in 1 direction at a time. It operates 2am-12:30pm inbound and 2pm-12:30am outbound Monday-Fri and the opposite on Weekends & Public Holidays. The 1.5 hour gap is used to close the expressway to make sure all cars get off it before opening it to traffic in the opposite direction. I recorded a video of my trip down the entire 24km of Expressway travelling southbound and 2km of the return northbound trip to show how the reversible freeway works. Only Adelaide could do something like this . Apparently they will begin the duplication project late 2011, so by next time I visit, this will probably be no different to any other freeway. You can watch the video below.

Microsoft & Windows 8

With the BUILD conference less than 1 month away now, the Windows 8 news is starting to heat up. I thought Ars Technica wrote an excellent piece on Windows 8 in their article entitled: “A sort of PC”: how Windows 8 will invade tablets (and why it might work). I won’t go into any detail about the article, because I think it explains everything really well itself, so if you have time, checking out the 4 page artuic

Busways & Tollways

Finally, since I’m so interested in roads and mapping, I will soon write a few blog posts about 2 related issues (when I’m not busy with something else). One of them will be about Today Tonight’s Toll Road report that they aired last week and the second will be about public transport in Brisbane and more particularly, in the Redlands City Council.

Well, I’ve finished all my assignments for Semester 1 and minus the one exam I have for programming on June 28th, I’m on holidays from now until July 26th Semester 1 has been a great start into university and Semester 2 is looking much more interesting in terms of content! With that small piece of information out of the way, it’s time to share with you things I’ve found on the internet this week that have amused or interested me in some way (You’ll be able to very quickly tell, I spend a lot of time on news websites).

Richard Dreyfuss Does A Dramatic Reading Of The iTunes EULA

This was pretty funny. There’s not really too much to explain here other than listen to them below (each uses a different voice).

Please Read

Responsibility

Damages

Effective Until

Source: http://www.cnet.com/8301-30976_1-20068778-10348864.html

Microsoft Gives Away Apple iPods As Prizes

This is a story which is about 3 years old now that I stumbled upon this week. If you don’t know, Microsoft sells their own brand of MP3 players called Zunes. They’re actually really really good music players and if you are a music enthusiast who loves listening to music, then this is the device you’d want to get over the iPod (sounds crazy, but it’s true). The thing is, these were (and still are) only sold in the US & Canada for some reason. While most of the functionality from these players have been moved into Windows Phone 7 which is available here in Australia, Windows Phone 7 wasn’t around back in 2008. So the story was essentially, that NineMSN (a 50% joint partnership between the Nine Network and MSN (The Microsoft Network) was giving away iPods as prizes to Australias who used Microsoft’s Live Search (now Bing). The Microsoft US response was obviously, “using competitor products was frowned on at Microsoft”. NineMSN hit back though with the very true statement that, “if the Zune music player was sold in Australia it would have been offered as a prize instead. Where we don’t have a great product or we don’t have a product at all there’s no internal edict that says we’re not allowed to use competitor products”.

That’s completely true, we don’t have the Zune here in Australia, it’s not NineMSN’s fault that’s the situation. While this story is completely irrelevant to what’s happening today, I bring it up, only because we’re fighting a similar battle at the moment, not to bring the Zune Hardware to Australia, but to bring the Zune services such as the Music Marketplace. This is one small example of how Microsoft is letting their competitors get the upper hand on them here in Australia simply by not bringing the services that are available in the US to Australia.

Source: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/biztech/use-microsoft-to-win-apple-products/2008/07/02/1214950806443.html

Swiss Radio Station Airs 5 Hours Of Pornographic Music & Sounds

I listen to lots and lots of radio, but this one really weirds me out. Apparently a Swiss Radio station has started a 5 hour radio show (from Midnight to 5am) which is described by the producer as “acoustic porn”.

News.com.au says “The show will play soundtracks from 1970s porn movies – which according to Mr Scotoni have more “value” than the “cheap music” in modern porn – along with disco classics such as Love To Love You Baby by Donna Summer.”

This just shouts out ‘weird’ to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it rated highly in their ratings surveys in a few months time.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/technology/radio-porn-versus-internet-porn-swiss-get-rocks-off-and-roll-to-five-hours-of-erotic-beats/story-e6frfro0-1226072809602

Politicians are poorly paid and deserve higher pay, says Labor MP Robert Schwarten

I’m not sure if too many of you are going to agree with this (I don’t), but he said it anyway. He thinks that politicians should be paid more money, because they’re getting less than high school principals. Politicians make $133,804 per year (which actually seems like a pretty good pay packet really), but what he failed to mention is, they get a really good superannuation deal and pension when they retire. So they’re definitely not going to be struggling when they retire from a financial perspective. If you check out the comments from the story, wow, this pollie gets absolutely reamed! Back in your box sir, and start to help get the state out of debt!

Source: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/politicians-are-poorly-paid-and-deserve-higher-pay-says-labor-mp-robert-schwarten/story-e6freoof-1226072227131

Canberra Has Australia’s Best Nightlife, Or So They’re Trying To Say?

This was just plain odd, but at the same time very very funny. If you’ve ever watch The Gruen Transfer, then you’ll know there’s a segment each week called “The Pitch” where 2 ad agencies battle it out to create ads to sell something that is just so stupid or unsellable (e.g Invading New Zealand etc.). Well there was an ad agency event this week (held in conjunction with The Gruen Transfer) that asked ad agencies to sell Canberra’s nightlife as the best in Australia. I prefer the second one best, but they’re both, very odd and very funny.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/travel/australia/go-governmental-ads-aim-to-convince-us-canberra-nightlife-is-the-best-in-the-world/story-e6frfq89-1226072005651

Woman pees from veranda, falls on picket fence, sues her ex

After reading this story, one thing comes to mind really: What’s wrong with the toilet, the inside one?…….

Source: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/woman-sues-ex-for-falling-while-peeing/story-fn7x8me2-1226072672462

I think that’s all the posts I’ve got for this week. There’s a bunch of other weird stories including the St Kilda School story & the Pauline Hanson vote counting story that are just too weird and complex to go into so I’ll let you look them up yourself if you want. Leave comments as usual! Over & Out!

I haven’t blogged for quite a while (although I’m constantly micro blogging on Twitter and Facebook), but I have been storing up a collection of links, stories, thoughts and other tidbits that I thought would be nice to share with all of you here who read my blog

Opera Talks Oprah

Oprah’s show finished up this week in the US and as their tribute to this, the browser company Opera (which is a common misspelling of Oprah because the words sound very similar) decided to post a blog featuring letters they had received from fans over the years, intended for Oprah but received by them instead. They’re very funny some of them (including the responses) and you can check them all out at: http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/05/25/oprah-winfrey-we-will-miss-you

Alan Jones & The National Broadband Network

Alan Jones is Sydney’s number 1 breakfast radio show on station 2GB and he’s always fired up on several issues. This week he spent some time talking about an advancement in Fibre-Optic technology. Apparently, “German scientists have broken a speed record, sending data contained on 700 DVDs over a single laser beam in one second, Seven hundred DVDs. In one second. The scientists at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology said they’ve broken the world record by sending data at a speed of 26 terabits per second. Canberra wants us to believe that the technology we’re spending anything up to $60 billion on won’t be outdated by the time it’s rolled out.”

What Alan Jones did though, was unintentionally give his support to the NBN, because as he probably didn’t realise, the NBN is going to be a Fibre-Optic network and therefore the speed records these German scientists have come up with could be added into the NBN. This is the problem, the people who are generally in charge in this world (baby boomers) and who against this don’t understand the technology properly. The reason I think the NBN will take an extremely long time to be outdated (if ever) is that it sends data as light pulses down the wire and currently the speed of light is the fastest anything can travel, that’s just physics. So the bit that we can speed up in the future if needed is not the cabling, but the transmitters and receivers at each end that convert electrical pulses to light and back again. So all we would need to do theoretically is upgrade these transmitters at each end and we’re all good, replacing the copper cabling with Fibre-Optic cabling only needs to be done once.

You can read the whole Alan Jones & NBN story here: http://www.news.com.au/technology/shock-jock-impressed-by-laser-speed-breakthrough/story-e6frfro0-1226062824273

Windows Phone 7 Major Update (Codenamed: Mango) Announced, But Still A Few Concerns About It…

This week was a big week for Microsoft as they announced about a dozen out of the 500 new features coming to the Mango release of Windows Phone 7, which is due to hit phones in Spring here in Australia. Microsoft didn’t announce every feature though (they’re going to keep drip feeding features over the next few months to keep the excitement & momentum up between now and the actual release) and they left a number of questions remaining. Firstly they didn’t announce the version number this update would bring the phone up to. Some say it will bring the phone up to version 7.5, others say 7.1 (the beta tools they released are 7.1) and others say they will brand it as 7.5 but internally it will be 7.1. The much more important questions that Microsoft still haven’t answered are in relation to feature availability outside the US. In January (after visiting Leo Laporte in the TWiT cottage in California) I wrote an article talking about Windows Phone 7 feature availability in regions outside the US. This week Microsoft demoed some amazing technology called Bing Local Scout which allows you to see all the local attractions, shops and eating places in the location you’re currently at, all within Bing Search built into the phone. As I was watching this, I was thinking, wow this is great, but I don’t think this is coming to Australia. I was right, as in the promo graphics about it, there was fine print saying US & UK only. The same will probably occur for anything involving speech commands too. I’ll be getting around to writing a new article at some point which details the new markets for the App Marketplace and about what Australia now will and won’t have access to in Mango. We will get probably about 3/4 of the features they’ve announced so far, but as for the other 1/4 – we can only hope

My Goal To Become A Microsoft Student Partner

Talking of Microsoft, I am planning to try and become a Microsoft Student Partner. Now that’s not an easy thing to do, but I’m going to try it, because I simply love Microsoft products and want to try and become involved with the company and make some contacts. So over the next week I’ll probably try and plan a submission and hopefully I can get into that. If I do, it would be quite exciting

Mac Malware

This month is has been the one where Macs all around the world are about to lose their innocence and will have something installed on them that they’ve never had installed before: Malware. Yes, the Mac has finally come of age (thanks mainly to the success of the iPhone, iPod & iPad as well as Apple’s clever marketing during Microsoft’s stumble with Vista from 2006-2009) and they’ve become popular enough that they’ve just started to become a target for Malware authors. This article (http://www.tuaw.com/2011/05/14/malware-macs-and-crying-wolf-doing-the-math/) is a great article on the topic. Essentially what it says now, is about 80% of people running Windows have working Malware on their systems and that 16% of computers now are Macs and essentially NONE of them run Anti-Virus or even think about Malware, thanks to this belief Apple has sold people on: “Macs Can’t Get Viruses”. Well – They Can! So essentially about 20% of the Windows PC market is easily susceptible to viruses and now the Mac is catching up to that very quickly with 16% of it’s users easily susceptible to viruses. So that explains the Malware. So Mac users, your time of innocence is over. Please – go and get yourself and Anti-Virus and install it and practise safe computing just like Windows users have had to do for years, don’t install strange software, turn off Safari’s featuring of automatically opening “Safe” files & be careful where you surf – no more ideas like “I’m going to buy a Mac so I can surf porn without getting viruses”. By the way, the two pieces of Malware are MacDefender (which shares the name of an actual legitimate piece of software just to confuse you), which is also being known as Mac Protector, Mac Security and Apple Security Center which requires the user to actually enter their administrator username and password to install the malware. The second new piece of malware that’s just been released by the same people is called MacGuard and the scary thing is: this one DOESN’T require the administrator username and password. So that’s that and hopefully I don’t start getting tech support calls from Mac users wondering what the heck is going on. Oh & this goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway – If it does get on your system: DON’T give it your credit card number!

Sony, Sony, Sony – What Are We Going To Do With You?

Sony has been hacked about 3-4 times in the last 7 days. They NEED to fix their security and QUICKLY. Nuff said!

End Of Semester 1 Near

It’s only 1 week left until Semester 1 of  my first year at uni is finished! It’s been such a fast semester. QUT was a great choice and I’m enjoying it immensely. Now I’ve gotten my core units out of the way, I can start to go study units I’m really interested in . The only thing I miss at Uni is not being to see some people every day that I used to see every day at OC, but that’s the way things go, at least I can still communicate with them on Facebook. It’s also allowed me to find some new friends too, which is probably good for me, especially since they’re all studying IT too! I’m nearly at 70 hours in my Learners logbook, so I’m well on the way to getting my P plates by September like I plan to!

Well I think that’s it for now. I hope lots of you get to read this blog post and leave your comments as you see fit! Also keep any eye out on www.andrewtechhelp.com. I have a few articles planned for the site coming up soon (within the next month or so), so follow me on twitter (http://twitter.com/andrewtechhelp) or Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Andrew-Tech-Help/53742949428) and that will keep you up to date with any changes there!

I recently went on a holiday to the west coast of the United States of America and it was a wonderful holiday. I was originally going to write a blog post each day of the trip, but I soon realised that it would be better to write a summary post once I got home instead. So here’s my story of my trip to America, the things I noticed, the things I did and my observations and conclusions about the country. I may jump around a bit, but that’s just how I write, I write what comes into my head next, so sorry if it’s a little hard to follow.

I started off the trip by flying direct from Brisbane to Los Angeles via VAustralia. This is an excellent airline, their in-flight entertainment system means that although the flight was 13 hours, I didn’t get bored because there was numerous movies, songs, tv shows and games to play. I ended up watching Vampires Suck, listening to good music such as Meatloaf and Kylie and just generally relaxing. We left at 12pm Brisbane time and got in at 1am, or 7am US Pacific Time.

In Los Angeles we stayed out at Anaheim, or about 10 minutes walk from Disneyland. We spent the next day driving out to Hermosa beach to see one of Dad’s old friends and then up to Venice beach. America has some very interesting differences when it comes to driving. Yes, they drive on the other side of the road compared to us, but there are several other differences too. Firstly, at the majority of intersections, a red light doesn’t always mean stop, it means stop if you’re going straight ahead or left, but if you’re turning right, then go right through. This is quite hard to get used to coming from Australia where red means stop… no matter what, especially as a pedestrian who expects all the traffic to have stopped when the walk man comes up, but then sees a car who is turning right. They’re legally supposed to give way to you, but they don’t always. They also often turn their lights to flashing red or yellow at night, which means treat this light as a stop sign or treat this light as a Yield sign respectively. Finally, the traffic is a lot more stop and start than here in Australia due to 4 way stop signs. Most suburban intersections in Australia either have no signs, a Give Way sign or a stop sign, but only on the minor road in the intersection. In America there are a lot of 4 way stop signs at intersections which means that all directions have to stop and then the car which got there first can go, followed by the next car which got there 2nd etc. I don’t know what happens when 4 cars get there at exactly the same time though lol.

So the next day I went and did the Hollywood and Universal studios tours. Hollywood is just a bunch of normal upper class suburbs with lots and lots of trees blocking out the mansions from view from the street. I get angry though when I hear that some of these celebrities have 40 houses across the world. I don’t think they need or should be allowed to own that many houses, especially when they would spend the majority of their time empty – it’s just an example of the need to spread extreme wealth more equally. The Universal studios complex is just a theme park, so not to much to write about here.

The next 2 days I spent at Disneyworld. Again it’s a theme park, so I don’t have a lot to write about this, but there was one sweet as room called Innoventions. This room was basically a home of the future style exhibit using to my shock – completely Microsoft products: Xbox 360′s, Zune HD’s, Windows 7 PCS, Windows Media Center, Microsoft Surface tables, everything except Windows Phone 7, which I imagine would be coming. We spent New Years Eve at Disneyland (which was just overcrowded) and then moved on to the next part of our trip.

We then drove up the Interstate 15 and 40 towards the Grand Canyon. This was a long drive and we never did make it to the Grand Canyon that night because once we got close to a town called Williams, there was snow everywhere. So we stayed at Williams that night under advice from the locals who said the small road up to the Grand Canyon would be dangerous at night because of possible black ice. It was -16 degrees there that night, very cold. We did make it up to the Grand Canyon the next day and we had a helicopter flight over the Canyon which is an amazing experience. We then drove to the visitors centre and looked over the edge of the Grand Canyon. What shocked me the most is that, there’s not any fencing around the edge. Just a small knee high brick wall, nothing more, which is so strange when you think of America’s “I’ll Sue You” society.

We then drove to Las Vegas. Well this is an interesting place, there are Poker Machines at the airport, at the car rental place, in the Casinos obviously, and as a child I was legally allowed to walk through all of them, as long as I didn’t try to play the machines. We visited the Coca-Cola store which was a pretty cool place and also saw “The Lion King” stage show, which was excellent! Dad was getting a bit sick here, so we decided instead of driving out to the coast and then up the coast to San Francisco that we would fly back to Los Angeles and then proceed up the coast. Well Dad fell unconscious on the plane there so we had to stay at the hospital at Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles. This treatment cost $7000, but thankfully travel insurance covered that. Dad was then fine, so we continued up the coast on US Highway 101 to San Francisco.

San Francisco was my favourite place on the whole trip. It didn’t have the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, but it was calmer and had more class and style. It also was very close to Silicon Valley down near San Jose. If you lived in San Francisco and you walked around, you’d certainly be quite fit, because it’s an extremely hilly city, with the building style more like that in the UK where houses are all connected together and backyards are non existent. The first day we were in San Francisco we drove down to look around Silicon Valley. This was an amazing place. It’s so cool to see where companies like Google, Apple, Skype, HP and Intel have their headquarters. You unfortunately can’t go into most of those companies’ buildings, but just seeing them from the outside is cool. Intel have a great Museum/Shop which I visited and could have spent more time at, but time constraints meant I couldn’t. I also wanted to visit The Computer History Museum but sadly that was closed for renovations. The rest of the week in San Francisco was spent checking out the city, riding the cablecars and streetcars and the BART and MUNI public transport systems. I visited a Best Buy and they seriously have cheaper prices than Australia for nearly every piece of electronic equipment.

On the day before I went home, I got to drive to Petaluma and meet the one and only Leo Laporte in the TWiT Cottage (TWiT stands for This Week in Tech). TWiT is responsible for some of the best technology podcasts available on the internet and soon moving to an Internet enabled TV near you. This is one of the many things I wished to check off to have done before it’s not possible to anymore, so it’s great I got the opportunity. The TWiT team are very friendly and Leo Laporte is the legend I thought he’d be.

The next day we flew home back to Brisbane and flying in over Moreton Bay I witnessed the aftermath of the Brisbane Floods, with all the debris in the bay. The Queensland floods actually made big news in America, which is a real surprise, considering their media mainly focuses on internal affairs. Everyone who found out we were from Queensland immediately asked if our house was going to be ok with the floods and we thankfully were able to tell them that it was. So now it’s probably time to mention my thoughts on the country. In many ways, it felt a bit backwards compared to the way we do things in Australia, which surprised me. Here are a few examples:

• Money – They still use paper money which all looks exactly the same and is easily tear-able. Here in Australia we used polymer plastic bank notes with different colours and sizes for each denomination. Showing Australian money to Americans amazed them and many said they wished they had our money. Coins were also weird, especially the one cent coins, which are essentially useless and just build up in your pockets. Also the coins don’t get bigger for each denomination (the 5 cent coin is bigger than the 1c and 10c coin) and most coins don’t have a big number on them telling you how much they’re worth. It just makes things harder. Australia definitely has better money than the US.
• Tax Exclusive Prices – The other major issue I had was paying for items using cash. In Australia, the price tag on the item is exactly what you will pay at the cash register (except for rounding, you have to round to the closest 5 cents, but that’s easy enough), but in the US, the price on the tag is not what you will pay at the register because it doesn’t include tax. Here in Australia it is illegal to advertise the tax exclusive price, all prices must be tax inclusive. It would make things a LOT easier in the US if they introduced that, because paying for items over there is a bit of a guess if you want to pay just using small change.
• Tipping – Tipping is simply a way to make up for employers not paying their staff enough. We don’t have to tip in Australia because we actually pay our staff a larger wage that they don’t need to ask for more. It means prices are more expensive for services, but you end up equalling that anyway once you add the tip on.
• Homelessness – There’s a lot more homeless people who are visible on the street in the US, which made me sad . I simply don’t see that around Brisbane. You see them occasionally, but not on every street corner and that’s because we have a well established welfare program here. For the sake of all those homeless people, America needs one too.
• Guns – I swear the attitude on guns stems back from the independence and civil wars. In these moderns days, it’s just not necessary in my opinion for every citizen to carry around loaded firearms. There aren’t any enemy forces to need to protect yourself from and if nobody had weapons in public then you also wouldn’t need guns to protect yourself from other guns. The stats of the rate of gun sales increasing 16% in Arizona after the Arizona shootings just shows that a serious change of attitude surrounding guns is probably needed. That’s my view anyway, I know a lot of you will disagree, I can understand that.

So that’s basically it. I will mention that I had a great time in America, the people were very friendly, the technology was modern (yay for Free Wifi), there was lots and lots to see and it was an enjoyable experience I hope to have again, possibly in the form of a Uni Exchange in a few years!

I haven’t blogged in a little while. Arguably I should have posted something last week because it was my last day of high school for ever, but the day became so exciting and busy that I didn’t end up posting. So I will get you all up to speed on what’s happened since November 19th to today November 27th in this post.

Graduation day was a wonderful day. The school made it a really special day and made each graduate feel special and valued. It started with a full school assembly (Prep to Year 12) where the prefects and medallion students (those who spent their schooling from year 1 to 12 at the same school) were recognised. Then the valedictory with just the year 12 parents, students, form teachers and administration was also a special event. Many year 12 students spoke (some who were normally so quiet I had never heard more than 2 words out of them at a time) about their experiences from year 8 to year 12 and it was just a wonderful day. We then were presented with our certificates and we then left school forever. I went to a mini graduation party that night, which was a nice time to chill and just relax with friends from school.

The next day most graduates disappeared off to schoolies, while I stayed home and started reading about how to program Windows Phones – very exciting stuff. On Tuesday I went down to visit the schoolies on the Gold Coast. Was awesome to see Dan, Bre, Fraser, Rachael, Robyn, Ashleigh, Ashlee, Ashley, Madi, Hugh, Harry, Rob, Tom, Chris, Will, Michael, Stix, Chanelle, Alicia, Joel, Dexter & Many Others. Spent some time chilling in apartments, shopping and playing mini golf, but avoided the beach as usual ;D (curse you sand). That was a great day and I think I left at the right time before dark

Then Wednesday I finally got it – My First Windows Phone 7 handset! Sooo Happy! It’s a HTC 7 Mozart on Telstra’s $49 Cap which means $400 worth of texts and calls per month, plus 1GB of data to use each month (since they put the data limits on all their plans up 2 days before I purchased). It’s just a gorgeous phone, very sleek and responsive, most of the apps I want are there, integrates well with Microsoft services and anything which is currently missing is to be added in future updates which should hopefully ship regularly throughout 2011. Thanks for my step brother Michael for selling this to me

HTC 7 Mozart - Windows 7 Start Screen

HTC 7 Mozart - Windows Phone Games Hub

Thursday I went for my first driving lesson with an instructor. Now, I know my driving has been shocking over the last 2 years – since getting my learners in Feburary 2009 I have only driven about 6 hours and that was with my parents. Well finally I decided I needed to start to learn to drive, so with the help of an official driving instructor I will build up my confidence and aim to have my 100 hours done as quickly as I can. I’m hoping by September or October next year to have made up my 100 hours so I can start to go for my P plates.

Finally yesterday I went an visited my old primary school’s Special Education Unit to see my friends and old primary school teachers at the cafe they run up there every fortnight. It was a great day. So coming up for me there are  few exciting things. Firstly there’s the Melbourne trip which is going to be fantastic. Melbourne’s a wonderful city and spending a whole week there doing things for myself is awesome! Then there’s getting upgraded internet from ADSL1 to TPG ADSL2+ 200GB download per month, which will mean I can start to look at using Ustream for things more often and finally then America!

Anyway – I think this post is done. The first post school week has been great and I hope the rest of the holidays between now and university continue to be awesome!

As you’d know just from reading this blog and especially if you actually know me, I’ve been immensely excited about Windows Phone 7 since it was first announced in February this year, but especially excited since the RTM was announced in September.

Well, the problem has been, Microsoft hasn’t exactly done a great job at promoting Windows Phone 7 in Australia and the Apple obsessed media has skipped over the release, because even though it’s better than the iPhone, the media seems to think any device that isn’t displayed on stage by Steve Jobs doesn’t deserve any attention at all, which is just rubbish and shows the problem with the way technology is being reported in Australia at the moment.

Update: Microsoft has just announced on Twitter they’re launching their Windows Phone 7 TV ads tonight! Here’s what it will look like (minus the coming soon part, since it’s here!)

Anyway, because of this, I thought I would be the first person that I know to actually get one of these phones, because of the lack of knowledge and buzz around them. Last night though I was given a pleasant surprise when one of my friends asked me on Facebook how to Sync their HTC Phone. I thought they were talking about the HTC Desire which is a Google Android based phone, but they were talking about a HTC 7 Mozart phone – the first Windows Phone 7 based device in Australia! Soooo Excited! The answer of course was to download the Zune PC Software 4.7 from www.zune.net but I was soo excited to hear that someone has a Windows Phone. They allowed me to take a few photos of it today so here they are

The other great thing was the reviews. I was asking different people who had seen it what they thought of it and there was so many “oh it’s so much better than the iPhone” comments. This just proves that it’s a great phone, that people would love if they knew about it. It’s true that there is a LOT of stuff missing from it at the moment, but nearly all of those can be fixed by software updates in the future, which Microsoft has promised will occur frequently throughout 2011 (and maybe late 2010). You have to remember though, that this is a v1 product, a complete rewrite from their previous Windows Mobile devices (they share absolutely nothing in common with each other) and so priorities had to be established. What Microsoft did get done is fantastic and is much better than the iPhone when it was at v1. I plan to get a Windows Phone 7 based device (when I buy there will be more handsets available, although the HTC 7 Mozart does look fantastic) by my 18th birthday in January next year and between now and then there will be plenty of content about it on my website!

Well it’s the end of the final school holidays and this has been a pretty good school holidays. I’ve balanced my ‘Andrew’ things with social things and managed to get lots done.

I saw the launch of 2 TV stations (7Mate on September 25th @ 5:57pm and GEM on September 26th @ 6:00am) which were historical events which also meant I saw the end of 2 TV stations (7HD and 9HD) as they were replaced by the 2 new ones.

I also witnessed the final release of the Windows Live Essentials 2011 @ 3:00am on Friday 1st October and installed it straight away. This is a serious improvement to the Windows Live Essentials, especially Windows Live Messenger which now gains Facebook Chat integration

I also got time to write 6 articles on my website, which had been neglected since July. If you want to read them they’re about the Internet Explorer 9 Beta, Windows Phone Developer Tools, Windows Live Proofs, Prepping Your Windows Live Profile For Windows Live Essentials 2011, How To Disable Facebook Places & Windows Live Essentials 2011 Review.

So they were all my ‘Andrew’ things, I also some social events into my calendar (a lot more than normal) including entertaining some Victorian friends, a tech crew social night, my friend’s (Nick) girlfriend’s (Toni) murder mystery birthday party and another of my friend’s (Rachael) belated birthday dinner as well as seeing my friend Alex today. I enjoyed my social events this holidays and was probably good prep for my university days

Daylight Saving started today in NSW, VIC, TAS and SA today, but not in QLD – very sad news and shows that Anna Bligh and Labor won’t listen to Queenslanders.

So that was my last school holidays and I think it was a damn good one! School returns tomorrow and in 35 days I will have graduated from high school and be on my way to university. Just gotta sort that English out this term….

Decided I’m going to have a rant about the English curriculum in QLD (and this probably applies to all states in Australia). In Queensland to receive your QCE (Queensland Certificate of Education) you have to complete a certain number of semesters in approved subjects (which is fair enough) and you have to pass the literary and numeracy requirements, which also seems fair enough…but Queensland’s definition of literacy is stupidly complex in my opinion.

To pass English in Queensland you have to pass both the oral and written aspects of the English course. The course is the problem though. The course doesn’t really reflect your ability to read and write, it deals with a whole lot of other things such as memory, creativeness, emotion and subjective interpretation – which count absolutely NOTHING towards being literate.

I failed an oral task where I had to act out a scene from a Shakespeare play and if I fail the next task where I have to analyse poetry and discuss what it says to me, then I fail English and am apparently illiterate – YET I CAN WRITE THIS BLOG POST IN CLEAR ENGLISH!

The tasks this year for English have included a motivational speech on leadership, an essay about Shakespeare’s play, acting out a scene from a Shakespeare play, writing an literary film review from a movie, writing an analytical essay from a 20th century novel, writing a short story from a line of poetry & finally recording a podcast about poetry and what it says to you. Not a single one of those tasks can differentiate between a literate and non literate person, they differentiate between people who are good at reading meanings out of books, movies and plays that do not need to be analysed unless you wish to become someone involved in literature in your further studies.

I always perform poorly in short stories because I am not a creative person. I have immense difficulty coming up with ideas and I generally deal in facts, figures and technicalities and not in emotion, creativeness and fiction. That task disadvantages me greatly, because these are things that cannot be taught, you either have them or you don’t and with the way my brain works, I have more difficulty than most people with these types of thinking and therefore only scraped a C for this task. The same thing with the Shakespeare oral, where you have to act out a scene from a play. I have poor acting skills, have difficulty remember large amounts of text that I cannot understand or process easily and because of this I failed this task.

The final task I have to complete is analysing modern poetry and then creating a podcast looking at what it is trying to say to today’s youth audience and it’s relevance. I’m supposed to read the poem and feel the meaning from it and see what it is trying to say to me, even without actually understanding actually what it means. When I read the poetry, it doesn’t actually mean anything to me, it is just a bunch of words thrown together on a page – yet if i was to put that into my podcast, I would fail. If I fail this English assessment – then I fail English and therefore I am illiterate according to the QSA – YET AGAIN, I’M WRITING THIS BLOG POST IN ENGLISH JUST FINE.

The English system in Queensland is a joke and needs radical reforms and quickly. The current English curriculum favours those who are creative and not those who can simply spell and punctuate correctly and use correct grammar. Shakespeare, analysing films, plays, novels and poetry are not skills that you need to be able to function in day to day life and are definitely not skills you need to be considered literate, although according to the QSA they are. There are stacks and stacks of people out there who have passed English, yet they cannot string sentences together properly, cannot spell and certainly cannot punctuate. It’s because there is so much time wasted on this other rubbish that the actual basics of literacy are forgotten. English needs to be structured into a system like Mathematics, where there is a general course (Maths A) for those who wish to be numerate and able to use maths to overcome everyday situations such as currency, basic measurement and statistics, and then more advanced courses (Maths B & C) for those who require extra levels of Maths for their further studies or for those who simply have the interest.

Why is it not required that all schools offer an English course which deals with issues such as filling in forms correctly, reading timetables and schedules, basic comprehension, putting proper sentences together, spelling and punctuating correctly? This course can be offered to anyone who just wishes to be classified as literate and then you can simply offer all the extra emotional interpretation skills and performances to those who wish to study it in English B and Drama.

To all of you across Queensland who have some hard slogs coming up for the next term in English to simply pass – I wish you all the best. To all those coming up through the English system in future years, I hope that reforms come sooner rather than later so this nonsense is stopped.

A few years ago when I was in Scouts we searched through the Venturers room at our Scout den one night, I came across some packages that I really wanted to keep, because I knew the significance of them. In the room among computer equipment that had been long long forgotten, 2 boxes took my fancy. One of them was the original software box with manuals and disks for Windows 3.1 and the other was the original software carton with manuals and disks for Office 4.3. So I was allowed to take them home (the would have been dumped otherwise) and they’re now going to be safely archived for a long time. The products were released in 1992 and 1994 respectively and this is what each looks like.

Windows 3.1 Desktop

Microsoft Office 4.3 (Microsoft Word 6.0)

Anyway, so I have kept these boxes and now I’m going to show you exactly how software was packaged in 1994. Firstly, they came in cardboard boxes, with thick detailed manuals and most software came on Floppy Disks. This is the packaging for Windows 3.1 – Circa 1992.

Windows 3.1 Product Box

Windows 3.1 Product Manual & Installation Disks

So this was what Windows 3.1 looked like. It came in a cardboard box and arrived in 7 floppy disks. Disk 1-6 included the system files, while Disk 7 had additional printer drivers on it.

Microsoft Office 4.3 (which included Word 6.0, Excel 5.0, PowerPoint 4.0 and Access 2.0) came in a very heavy carton. Here are some of the pictures of that.

Microsoft Office 4.3 Carton

Microsoft Office 4.3 User Manuals

Microsoft Office 4.3 User Manuals

Microsoft Office 4.3 User Manuals

Microsoft Office 4.3 Installations Disks

This piece of software 10 user manuals and was delivered on 24 Floppy Disks, 23 being program installation disks and disk 24 including the free to distribute PowerPoint Viewer. Unfortunately for me, Disk 7 of this package no longer works, but thanks to the wonders of the internet and a website called VetusWare, I was able to download another copy of the software so I now have a disk 7 replacement

So that’s how programs were distributed in the early 1990s. I think Windows 95 was the first version of Windows offered on a CD and Windows 2000 Professional was the last version of Windows offered on Floppy Disks. Windows 3.1 is actually a fairly decent operating system if you only want very basic word processing needs on an old computer (although the 8.3 File name limit is a pain, it’s the one thing that makes 95 extremely appealing). Imagine today having to load 23 floppies into your computer if you wanted to install Microsoft Office instead of just sticking the DVD in, and 20 minutes later it’s done.

I hope to keep this stuff for a long time, I think it’s important to see where computers have come from!!

Got An Email Tonight From “Standard Bank” and I expected a fully graphical scam phishing email, but instead I got this – the HTML code of that graphical email instead. I think they must have accidentally set it to plain text instead of HTML. Here’s a copy of the message below. (Please Do Not Visit The Links In This Post, They’re Phishing Links)

So yea – effective phishing mail – NOT!