[ccc-news] Assorted News 13 🙂
In this edition:
Important News
Memory Stick viruses.
Holiday – Sept 8th to 12th
Tips
Broadband via NextG phone suddenly much more affordable.
Google Street View
Automatic Wallpaper Changer
Trivia:
Molly & The Story to go with her.
nVidisaster?
Guyra buys a Monorail, Takes No Crap from Tingha
Seven Register Theory
Mike’s Incomplete Philosophy and Belief System Review.
Question for you re. these newsletters.
Memory Stick Viruses.
When viruses were first invented, they often used to spread via floppy disks. With the advent of email, etc, this trend died off until quite recently when some new viruses began to emerge that would copy themselves onto memory sticks. I encountered one last week for example, which was quite clever. The virus hid itself in the bin that was on the memory stick, and then set up another file to tell the computer to open the virus from in the bin whenever the stick was plugged into the computer.
Fortunately, both XP and Vista do a reasonable job of protecting you from this trick because when you plug a stick in to them, they usually ask you what you want the computer to do, rather than just doing whatever the stick asked for. However, the first item in the list is usually the one that says something along the lines of ‘run the program provided on the device’ which, unless you know what that program is, you shouldn’t do 🙂
Holiday: September 8th to 12th.
As mentioned later in this newsletter, I have a timeshare holiday that I have to use or lose – so rather than lose my $500 or so, I’ll be taking a week off in Tuncurry. I will of course still be online and able to help with problems via remote control and over the phone – I just won’t be able to readily park outside your residence to fix your computer. Feel free to call despite my being away – as I’m happy to help 🙂
Broadband via NextG phone suddenly much more affordable.
As you probably know, I’m not a great fan of Telstra – their pricing is after all usually what the market will bear, not what is reasonable. However, it appears that thanks to stiff competition regarding the new iPhone, Telstra has drastically reduced the price of one of their facilities by about 80% – I guess they had to because their prices for internet over the mobile phone truly stank compared to Optus & Vodafone, so presumably no one was buying them from the big T.
At present, if you have any contracted NextG mobile phone, you can now buy what’s called a ‘data pack’ and then connect your phone to your computer and have broadband. $10 used to get you 20MB a month, now it gets 150MB. Sadly, and paradoxically, $30 only gets you 300MB, albeit with a lower excess fee. 150MB is still not much but it’s reasonable at that price point – and excellent if you want to be able to check your email, text chat online and read some webpages while on the road. Since there’s no ongoing contact with data packs, you can sign up a few weeks before going away and cancel when you get back.
If you’re currently on dialup, and you have a NexG on contract, I reckon it’s a great thing for you to try – dialup can only do about 7MB an hour so it gives you an idea what you could do with 150MB – and if you used up your 150MB before the end of the month you could just go back to dialup until the next billing cycle.
Now of course, I have no relationship with Telstra and don’t earn any money from suggesting this – but the Internet has really outgrown dialup for most people (pages are 3 times the sizes they were a few years ago for example) and I am quite happy to help you set it up since having happy customers is my highest priority. I do of course still offer dialup at $1 per hour if you need it as a backup.
It has yet to be confirmed if or when these new prices will be available for prepaid customers. I expect it will be at some point in the not too distant future, and at that point I’ll be recommending it to all dialup customers as prepaid phones are only $100 to buy – and just as important – no contracts!
Telstra data pack pricing is at http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/plans/browsing_packs.html
(Ignore the mobile as modem plans on that page – they’re almost twice as expensive as a BigPond Relocatable Modem plan.)
Google Street View
You can now look at photos of many streets in Australia including most of Armidale and about 2/3rds of Guyra. I’ve since discovered that the house in Eastwood I lived in still exists, the one in Cremorne has had a storey added, and my parents have a new fence.
To use it simply go to http://maps.google.com.au/ and then type in an address. A small photo appears near your destination on a map – and if you click it you can then use the arrows to drag around the photos and have a good look around. Lots of fun but a bit of a time waster too 🙂 To go to a new destination, drag the orange ‘man’ character to a new street.
Automatic Wallpaper Changer
One of my podcasts recently recommended a free wallpaper changer program – and it works quite well with no spyware or other nasties. It also gives you a calendar on the desktop which a few people have asked me for in the past. You can fetch it at http://www.johnsadventures.com/software/backgroundswitcher – however on my system it uses between 30 and 50MB of RAM so if your PC is fairly old or slow, it might not be for you. Anything two years or younger or with at least 1GB of RAM should be fine 🙂
Molly, and the story to go with her.
As you probably know by now, Heppie died on 24/7. A few days later I casually inquired about some dogs at the Armidale animal shelter. There was only one left there at the time, and the manager there didn’t think she’d be a particularly good match as she was a shy, excessively timid dog and not overly fond of men. So, I decided not to go any further in looking, and resolved to wait for one to find me again – like Heppie did years ago.
So, shortly after that, I call one of my customers to help her with a niggling VoIP issue, and whilst adjusting the PSTN voltage detection thresholds on her modem chatted casually. It turned out that she was the one who initially found the last two dogs to go into the shelter, and had delivered them there. Of course, she knew me somewhat better than the voice on the phone at the shelter, and felt we’d be a good match; so figuring this was near enough to being found, I followed up, had a meeting with Molly that Friday, and then a week later 8/8/08 she was delivered here.
She’s a 4-5 year old Border Collie, very shy, but otherwise good. So far she’s been for a few walks, has adapter to walking with the electric scooter, and seems to be settling in well. Monday will be a big test to see how she likes, or doesn’t like, travelling. It’s sad that her previous owners dumped her before moving to Sydney, and I guess I may never know why they did that, but at least she should have a good life here. The way she cringes at every unexpected sound makes me think they must’ve been pretty hard on her.
Oh, and a quick note of thanks to the 20+ people who wrote in with condolences on the loss of Heppie, and similar stories of your own. I will write back to you all individually soon!
Update: 1 day later she’s now getting a bit more spritely, runs well with the electric scooter, and has clocked up 10 metres in the Kingswood. I’m not sure if she’ll travel like Heppie – time will tell.
nVidisaster?
A while ago I wrote about an update for some HP laptops to prevent an overheating sudden death issue with them. Since then, some more manufactures have had issues, and it has been traced to a faulty batch of laptop parts made by nVidia. These parts make the pictures come up on the screen, so when they break you end up with a stuffed laptop.
At this stage it’s not clear exactly how many are affected, but the rumour mill’s running. If you want to see if your new laptop could be affected, right click on your wallpaper, choose Properties, then Settings. If you see nVidia models 8400M or 8600M then you may have a cause to worry. More information from the rumour mill here – http://apcmag.com/nvidia_disaster_thousands_of_gpus_faulty.htm
Guyra buys a Monorail, Takes No Crap from Tingha
On Thursday evening, I attended a meeting in Guyra which discussed Guyra council’s dramas and introduced three new candidates.
In summary, the claim appears to be that 82% of council’s savings (about 7 Milliion) were invested in CDOs offered by Grange Securities. I’m not really up on all this stock market jargon – so had to look up what a CDO was. Basically a CDO – or Collateralised Debt Obligation – appears to be what you get when you buy other people’s debts. You make money out of those people paying off their debts, because they pay interest on those debts which you get to keep. Problem is, Grange Securities was sourcing these debts from – you guessed it – the US, and you probably know already what’s happened to the US housing market. Thus, the money is tied up in people’s home loans and their real estate, and as more people default on their sub-prime loans, it adversely affects your money.
The heading is a reference to an old Simpsons episode where the Springfield council is conned into spending all their money on a Monorail – which apart from turning out to be impractical also tries to kill it’s occupants! The catchy song and story that goes with it is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxkNBTz4WWk (I can’t find a working legal copy of the whole episode online because Viacom doesn’t like Google.)
I’m terrible with names, so I could have this quote wrong. Boyd Munro reported (~7PM) that back in June 2005 section 1.5.7 of a legal document relating to council financial affairs was amended to state “The general manger or his delegated representative is authorized to approve variations to the policy if the investment is to Council’s advantage. All changes to the policy are to be reported to the next council meeting.” He stated that this effectively annulled the rest of the policy, and possibly explains how the mess started.
The value of these CDOs is now reported to be about 3 Million, but Boyd believes this figure is closer to $800,000 or less based on info from the NAB. I personally have no idea what they’re worth!
Many councils lost money to this arrangement – but it seems rather imprudent of the council to have put so much money in one investment. Related articles online are at http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/asic-protects-cdo-investors-names/2007/11/04/1194117879435.html and http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1940467/posts and http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119145916317748442.html – Manly for example only invested 10%. and has lost 65% of it.
Another issue raised was a Tingha resident who complained that Guyra was not doing enough for Tingha – Guyra having about 6 public toilets where Tingha has either one or none. (Hence the second part of the headline.) The PA system failed quite early on so the whole thing was a bit hard to hear at times – no I was not in charge of the diversity microphone with the flat battery!
The next 15% rate rise is more or less locked in, but the one after that could apparently be negotiated on with the council.
Anyway, the whole episode gave me cause to consider whether I’d be any good as a Councilor, and at the moment that’s an each way bet in my mind given that I know bugger all about politics and am usually the one alone in a crowd since I have a fairly one-track mind based on technology rather than beurocracy. If I was one I’d be all for transparency, having all meetings recorded and available on YouTube or similar, taking comments, etc although a brief read of the privacy act makes it sound like recording meetings is illegal – a point to which I despair as I feel anything said in public should be recordable for all time.
I’d also want to extend all decisions onto a public forum that people could access online from home and have their say on – since most of us are happy to click and read; but most of us don’t want to go to council meetings – which of course helps these silly decisions happen. However I’m pretty sure that if I took such ideas to an established group of councilors I’d be viewed as a newbie know-nothing too bent on technology, in breach of some arcane unknown privacy and discriminatory democracy rules, and the ideas’d be voted down. Perhaps I could achieve this better by not being a councilor and just attending meetings – more research required.
The Seven Register Theory
As promised last newsletter, here’s the Seven register theory.
Basically, it is believed that humans can hold about seven thoughts active in their working memory at one time, ignoring the subconscious. This is quite useful, particularly in some tasks in life that require using many at once.
A drama for us can be when one or more of these gets tied up with some background task, event, question, relationship or sexuality issue, loss, infatuation or trauma; leaving less registers available for other tasks at hand. There are many events in life that could cause this to happen.
Driving for example eventually becomes more or less subconscious at some point – but when first learning it’s quite easy to run out of registers and do something stupid. Even when you get more experienced at driving, if you’re distracted by something else you may end up missing something. For me, it’s usually zebra crossings that can get missed if I’m off with the fairies! (There’s one in Armidale which is right next to the corner, and an SUV blocks view of any pedestrian approaching the crossing.) To see the one I’m talking about on StreetView click http://tinyurl.com/badintersection2 (Corner Rusden and Faulkoner)
If you get a ‘stuck’ register it can make life a bit unpleasant – that is when something is on your mind and won’t get out. For me of course the most recent would be the loss of Heppie which for a while leaves you less able to concentrate on other tasks at hand. I think stuck registers are particularly prevalent when you’re a teenager which partly contributes to depression, etc – and also makes complex mutli-register tasks like mathematics a problem.
I believe there are some techniques available to help you jam more stuff into one register – but I haven’t researched that for ages. I do appear to have at least one sticky register – it plays music when I’m not doing anything, as for some reason I’m quite good at memorising music – yet I can still be thinking about other things at the same time. It might also be what gives me the unique but mostly useless and for other people highly frustrating ability to repeat back what people are saying, while they are still saying it – an echo if you like. I’m yet to find anyone who can handle this treatment!
Mike’s Incomplete Philosophy and Belief System review.
The following article was written over a number of days starting shortly after the loss of Heppie. It contains my thoughts on a number of different belief systems, philosophies, etc. Since it’s quite lengthy, and in rare cases could contain material some may find offensive, I’ve made it a blog post instead. If you’d like to know more about religions, mind control techniques and afterlife philosophies, and are not already decided on a path, then happy reading! It’s at http://auzzie.net/cccblog//index.php?title=mike_s_incomplete_philosophy_and_belief_&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
A question for you 🙂
Many people run blogs as opposed to just having a newsletter. Blogs tend to be updated more regularly than newsletters, but require the viewer to actively go to visit the website.
For off-topic articles like the last three, would you prefer they are included wholely in the newsletter, or would you prefer they were on the blog only, and linked to in the newsletter? Click reply and type an answer to let me know 🙂
Cheers, Mike.