Category Archives: General

Stuff that doesn’t fit into existing categories

F1 iTrip

Driving to work yesterday my iTrip suddenly stopped working. Where there should have been The Podcast Network‘s The Jazz Show was static, and screeching. When I paused the show there was a high pitched tone. It lasted all the way from half way up the bridge, down by Albert Park Lake to Malvern.

It wasn’t until I was driving home that the solution presented itself.

The Australian Grand Prix is on at Albert Park Lake and they have set up a temporary FM radio station for attendees.

So, if your iTrip is tuned to around the 91.5 mark and you are travelling through inner city Melbourne over the next few days you may wish to dig out the iTrip CD you never thought you’d use again and reconfigure your pod or you can download your iTrip software from the Griffin Technology site.

Wikipedia down, and MyDoom hits again

Wikipedia down: We’re currently recovering servers from a power failure in our colocation facility. This means backing up 170gb of database on several servers and running recovery. Back soon. … Let’s hope they’re back soon, and that that rumoured deal with Google goes through. Despite rumblings of lack of accuracy, Wikipedia is still a terrific resource.

Another MyDoom variant (rumoured to be Mydoom.o@MM) is playing havoc with mail servers and networks, particularly in big corporations. This one puts SCR, EXE and COM files in Zips, and sends them around. From the sounds if it, there’s still enough gullible people who blindly open attachments that it’s spreading fast through corporate networks. Time to remind all your non-geek friends to take care around attachments. Happily for me, most of my family are running Macs!

There Must Be A Way To Blame This On Microsoft

A while back I was moaning about how I couldn’t get my iPod to function on my PC, it refused to work with any USB 2 port and I had to resort to the incredibly slow USB 1. So instead of one hour of importing it took me a couple of weekends to get my 4500+ songs on.

So, to recap, I had plugged my iPod in to my USB card before and it didn’t work.

Last night I plugged my iPod in to a USB 2 hub connected to the same card and it worked perfectly.

I’m sure Microsoft must be to blame here somewhere but until I figure out where I’m going to blame it on Apple.

Outlook won’t undo

One of my long-term Outlook gripes: Undo can catch a lot of things, but one of the things I use it most for is when I’ve changed my mind about deleting an email, so I want it back out of the Deleted Items. But it only works if you deleted from the folder, not from within the email itself, which then returns you to the folder. Would it be that hard for the logic to say “hey, he pressed undo, he must mean undo the last action” (well duh) “so I’ll undo the mail delete he just did.”

Firefox, RSS & Newsgator

Seth Godin points out how Firefox makes it easy to work with RSS. An even better application of this idea is to combine it with the fantastic free online RSS feed tracker/news aggregator, Newsgator.

Newsgator manages your feeds online and offers a ‘Subscribe in NewsGator Online‘ bookmarklet so whenever you see the radar image on a page you want to track, click the bookmarklet and it’s automatically added to your Newsgator account. Now you don’t need to clutter up your bookmarks/favourites – just visit NewsGator to check all your feeds at once. Or you could set an ActiveWord to take you there.

What’s that? You don’t know what ActiveWords is? Stay tuned. Or better yet, download the 60 day free trial of ActiveWords (go for Active Words Plus to get the scripting engine) now. Tell Buzz that Tony Malloy sent you.

Where’s My Coffee

One of particular interst to Melbourne readers.

Hudsons Coffee have a rather unique view of Melbourne on their Store Locator page. I’ve never seen a map for this city laid out this way before and it’s very interesting.

The only suggestion I have is that they gave prominence to the wrong end. Most of the store are located around centre of the CBD, Swanston St and surrounds. The largest area on their graphic is also the emptiest (there are only four outlets west of Queen St compared with nine East of the same street) and you have to squint to figure out where most of the far stores are. They should have reversed the map so the Spring St end was in the foreground or, preferably, set Swantson St as the centre and maybe fish eyed the city.

Dis-Intergration

Coles Myer may make a fortune each year but it would seem none of that is spent on system integration.

Today I had to go to Myer Melbourne to purchase a wedding gift. In order to do this I had to go to the registry department, hand over a card with the event number on it, wait for a print out, decide what I wanted to buy, go to the floor, purchase the item and then return to the registry to tell them what we purchased so they could cross it off the list.

a) Why did I have to go in to Myer to get the list?
b) Why can’t I tell them what I want and organise them to get one from stock and wrap it once I’m there?
c) Why, if I follow their plan do I have to return to the registry department to tell them what I purchased? If I have to go to the department myself why can’t I show them the event card and have them mark the gift as purchased?

or most sensibly

d) why can’t I log on to myerregistry.com (don’t bother, it’s not there), enter the event number, select what I want to purchase and press the ‘Buy, Wrap and Send’ button.

Coles Myer, move into the 20th century at least before trying to catch up with your 21st century competition.

As it is, my nephew will be getting something that doesn’t come from Myer.