Blog
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Catania Medrano Real Estate: ethics free zone
I know, I know. I shouldn't be expecting ethics from estate agents. It's like trying to find a vegetarian shark. They're scum. All of them. They make used car salesmen seems like paragons of virtue. W…
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Bloody tired
Don't think I've been this knackered since my last bout of jetlag. Last night was one of those hot, still, humid evenings we get to look forward to in summer in Sydney. At 2am it was still 22° and I w…
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DVD menus: why oh why?
Last night I installed my grandmother-in-law's (is that a real term?) shiny new telly and DVD player for her, and was tasked with showing her how to use it. The telly is probably going to be okay, des…
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Digital antenna installation
I'm planning to put up an antenna for digital TV reception this weekend. Being in St Peters, I should be right in the Kings Cross transmitter's footprint. I sure as hell hope so because I'm going to b…
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Decibels
In response to yesterday's post about acoustic noise measurements, Matt Palmer, Rog and Michael Greb have pointed out that a "bel" is the base unit of "decibel", with a decibel being a tenth of a bel.…
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Acoustic noise levels
The reason I sold off the server I'd bought on eBay is because of the noise it generated. I already live right under the flight path to Sydney airport, so I don't need my own jet engine noise inside a…
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Server gone
Okay the server I I advertised yesterday has sold to a mate of my brother-in-law. Looks like it'll be doing service as a (very capable) file server. Now looking for similar-spec hardware that doesn't…
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Buy this Afghan girl now!
Am I the only one who finds this a little disturbing? Spotted on this New York Times page.
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For sale: NEC Express dual-Xeon server with 288GB RAID
Hi folks. I bought this server on eBay a couple of months ago and have decided it doesn't fit my purpose. It's an amazing piece of hardware, but it's as noisy as a jet engine and is a bit finnicky abo…
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Drought? What drought?
Australia is apparently experiencing the worst drought in living memory. You could've fooled me! Since moving back to Sydney from London it's rained more than it ever did in London, and that's the cit…
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Happy season folks
Well it's Xmas here in Sydney and it's pretty warm and humid, raining but it's supposed to clear in the morning for the big day. Xmas is more hectic, as expected, being in the same country as the fami…
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Cooking books are not for bedtime
I read some of In Search of Perfection as described yesterday before going to sleep last night. Not a good idea. I woke up craving fish and chips. Not really breakfast food now, is it?
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Short memory
Short memory must have a sho-oo-oort memory.
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Settling down in the Inner West
On Saturday I did some farting about in the house. Got flyscreens made for the windows, improved the window security a little, toyed around with my new Internode ADSL and Nodephone VOIP stuff. I also…
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Comment-less blogs
Russell Coker asks why people have blogs that don't allow comments. One thing: comment spam. But there are other reasons. It's a weird in-the-middle-of-nowhere forum system that never gets looked at a…
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In Search of Perfection
I've been working my way through Heston Blumenthal's book In Search of Perfection, which accompanies the TV show of the same name. Blumenthal is something of a food obsessive, to put it lightly. His t…
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Congratulations to Mohammad Yunus
Mohammad Yunus has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He's notable for starting the Grameen Bank, which was notable for designing a system that allowed poor people to borrow small amounts of money an…
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Word of the day: Confusopoly
Discovered this great word coined by Dilbert author Scott Adams: Confusopoly where instead of competing, companies instead try to bamboozle customers. It's a great term and applies in so many areas. B…
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ADSL on at last
Just got this message from my ISP: Provisioned: DSL Service is fully provisioned! Very nice, but due to Telstra fuckwittedness I can't get the lovely ADSL2+ speeds I wanted. Also still waiting on the…
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Server hassles
So over the weekend I started to work on getting my server running. This is an NEC system I bought off eBay, dual-Xeon, 2 gigs RAM and a big fat RAID array. It doesn't seem to cope with me plugging in…