The cable modem arrived today… and it flies like a rocket, especially on the new computer. Brilliant stuff.

Bang! - Scccccrrrreeeeeecccccchhhh. The aftermath of my first real prang.

Well, a milestone yesterday: I had the first prang in which I actually did some damage to my car.

I was in the carpark at Dick Smith, stocking up on LAN cards (well, just one really). As I parked, I got a little too close to the beaten up old truck in the next space.

Bang! - Scccrrreeeeccchhh. Oh bugger. I looked and couldn’t see any damage or trace whatsoever on the truck - but I found a big chunk of my bonnet protector on the ground, and a big scratch in my bumper! D’oh!

Ah well, the car’s just about due for a service anyway.

Meanwhile I’ve worked out how to nudge Telstra Bigpond Cable into action. Ring them up. Seriously, all I had to do to convince them to send someone out with my cable modem this Friday is ask them when they expected it to happen.

Some progress on the cable internet connection I ordered. After I rang up and badgered them a bit, they started moving into action. Ah yes, that’s how you deal with big companies: disturb them enough from their slumber to do something.

On Thursday morning a friendly bloke arrived in a van, fiddled with a box on the side of the building, clambered all over the roof, abseiled off the building using coax cable (that bit might be a complete lie), drilled a hole in the computer room wall and put in the socket. Then with a bright yellow multimeter (something which I think would be overwhelmingly cool to have, but which I know I’d use once then keep in a drawer forever) he measured the signal strength, filled in a form, then went away.

Another friendly bloke turned up a few hours later, to enticingly test a cable modem with the socket, and to report that they still had a shortage of cable modems, and I should ring up and badger them again because it was likely to get me a modem sooner.

So now I have two thirds of a cable modem connection. Which of course in terms of actually enjoying streaming video and all that jazz, is no better than no trace at all of a cable modem connection, but it is progress I suppose. Certainly the throughput on blokes in vans is quite incredible.

No word, meanwhile, from Comsec. Unlike the cable people, they’ve got plenty of opposition, so when and if I get the share trading urge again (I’ve waited so long I don’t feel like it at the moment) I’ll get onto it.

No word from Dell either, but they’ve completely missed this prospective customer now anyway. Gateway are due to deliver the goodies in a few days, which is just as well since they’ve already taken the <argh> dollars from my credit card.

Meanwhile my mate Brian and his wife Deanne have decided to emigrate to America. A bit unexpected, I must say, since they’ve just finished kitting out their new house. But good luck to them, I say, in their quest for fortunes in the wild untamed frontiers of Redding, California.

Anyway that’s enough from me - I need to go start planning my GST-related activities. The whole company side of things still confuses me somewhat. And more importantly, what should I stock up on before it hits on Saturday? Back to the ACCC web site for me…

Today I did my good deed for the week. Taking $90 out of the ATM down the street, I was rather surprised to find it gave me an extra $20, kinda wrapped around the other notes. Now, if it were a definite case of ripping off the Commonwealth Bank, most of us wouldn’t think twice. Heck, that’s probably a fraction of what I’ve paid them in bank fees over the past six months.

But it wasn’t. You can almost bet that it would be a case of ripping off the next poor sod who came along to use that ATM. Someone who might miss $20 a lot more than I would. So since the bank was open at the time, I went in and gave them the money. The bloke behind the counter seemed surprised that I would hand it in, but thanked me and took my details. Hopefully if it’s not actually missing from anywhere, they’ll give it back to me. But anything than walking around with it in my wallet, and having the guilt that somebody else might be thumping on the machine, swearing, and wondering where the last $20 from their account has gone to.

Today I ordered a new computer. The last time I bought a new computer was almost exactly five years ago. At the time, it seemed quite fast, but maybe this was an illusion, as it seems to have gradually got slower and slower over the years. I did get it upgraded last year, but after an initial burst of speed, it’s slowed down again.

With me doing increasing amounts of computer work at home, I (or rather, my company that I do contracting through) decided to splash out. This time round I decided to get a brand name, and hopefully avoid all the hassles I had last time with the monitor continually playing up and the hard disk dying. Okay, so I fully realise that this is no guarantee at all against that happening, but at the very least you can hope that <huge corporation> won’t go bust just before the warranty period expires.

In the past few weeks, I kept an eye on the pre-end-of-financial-year specials promoted by the big names: primarily Gateway
and Dell, since they are the ones who advertise in the newspapers I read. I’d heard good things about both companies’ desktop PCs (though I also heard rotten stories about Gateway notebook computers…) The specials seemed good, and I surfed over to both companies web sites for a look.

On both sites you can look at the available models, and try out various modifications to the configuration and let it tell you what the final price will be. On Gateway’s site, you get to the specials by clicking the button marked - wait for this - "Specials", which shows you basically what they’ve advertised in the papers that week.

Dell try to be clever: in their ads include codes called "E-Value" codes. You enter them into a box on their web site and in theory they show you the special from the ad that included the code. I say in theory because in practice, none of them worked. I sent feedback to Dell for help on this. They sent back one of those e-mails saying they’d get back to me.

I’m still waiting for them to get back to me, but it’s all academic now, since I gave up and ordered from Gateway. Which shows how potentially valuable answering your e-mail quickly can be.

The new computer, which arrives sometime next week, will be about ten times as fast, have thirty-two times as much RAM, and have eighteen times as much hard disk space, as the one I bought five years ago, but will cost only about ten percent more.

Of course, no matter how blisteringly fast it seems when I get it, I fully expect it to crawl like a snail in five years’ time. I was about to say it would run like a dog, but that expression doesn’t really make sense, since some dogs tend to run quite fast…

Speaking of big corporations, an update from my whinging a couple of weeks ago: After badgering Telstra on the phone say they may be able to connect up cable Internet
next week. But no promises. Meanwhile, no news from Comsec.

I’ve had some relaxation this weekend: the kids are away, staying with their mum for the long weekend. Not that I don’t like my kids of course, but it’s good to be given me a chance to get out and about and see some friends. Not to mention to be able to sleep in.

On Friday night I met a couple of mates for a dinner by the casino. We sat by the river watching those big flame column things going up every hour, and pondering what the gas bill must be like. Then we headed for a pub up on Swanston Street for a quiet drink. The odd thing was that a bloke in there recognised me - apparently we spoke on Richmond Station about eight years ago after I noticed he was wearing a Who t-shirt. I hope it wasn’t the time I was throwing up. He showed me his jacket, which looked like a costume out of Quadrophenia.

On Saturday morning I went down to Bentleigh for a coffee* and chat with a friend, which ended up as a mammoth chat for more than three hours. Then I headed back to home to meet up with Merlin, who is visiting Australia from London for a few weeks, and was staying that night in the spare room. He zoomed up, the image of cool, on a very very sexy motorbike.

*Not literally in my case, since I don’t drink coffee. I stick to tea or hot chocolate - the latter in this case. 

Then we caught a tram over to St Kilda to see Catherine, Josh and Cathy. After clarifying for Merlin who precisely was Cathy (Josh’s girlfriend) and who was Catherine (Josh’s flatmate), we debated what we were all going to do. Bowling? Pool? A restaurant or some other kind of food serving place where we could give them money and they could serve us food that we could eat? We decided to head up to Fitzroy Street.

We piled into Catherine’s tiny car for the short drive, somehow found a parking space without too much trouble, and went for a pint in the Elephant And Wheelbarrow. Nobody recognised me there, but Josh told me a story about someone he met being impressed that Josh knew me. Apparently the guy had been at Monash when I was there, in another course, and declared, "he was a LEGEND!" - which just goes to show, all you have to do is e-mail crap out to people every week, and you can be a legend.

In the discussion that followed, we agreed that that kind of fame only amounted to being a small "l" legend. In fact, a very small font, no bold, no italics, legend. In light grey. A kind of watermark, in fact, a barely noticeable legend.

The other notable discussion, as the beer took over, concerned Australia Post delivery times, and why they were slipping. Josh began to describe the Dandenong Sorting centre, and with some certainty I declared that the problem was that they now have just a bloody great big room, where they throw all the letters. A little postie comes along, picks up a letter and looks at it.

"Hmmm.. Okay, yes, I’ll just go and deliver this."

Two hours later he comes back and picks up the next letter.

"Hmmm.. Now where’s this going… Hey wait a minute… it’s for the same person!"

We carried on down Fitzroy Street to a restaurant the name of which escapes me for the moment, and chomped down some dinner, with Catherine having to wait an extra few minutes due to an unexpected delay on the Lasagne, and Josh enjoying the steamed vegies he had told the waiter he didn’t want.

Then a little further down we stopped for coffee at a bizarre combination bottle shop/deli/coffee place. The service was pretty bizarre too. Merlin was first to order his Cappuccino, and before anybody could add their drinks to the order, the woman rushed off for three minutes to make his. Catherine was smart, next ordering two cappuccinos for her and Cathy, which at least saved some time. Josh and I decided it really wasn’t worth all the bother.

From there we went to the Prince Of Wales for more drinks. Then to the Espy. We tried to be sneaky and "innocently" walk in the back entrance to avoid the cover charge, but the bouncer (not a huge tough Maori bloke as Josh predicted - he was on the front door instead) said we should go around to the front.

Well rather than pay $7 each for the privilege of coming in for a drink, we went to the Espy public bar instead, which was a bit quieter anyway, and over yet another beer we got to have a good laugh about the names of the bands advertised on the walls, and note how many of the posters had URLs on them. An example? www.Loingroin.com.

By that point most of us were a bit out of it. At least, I know I must have been - I wouldn’t normally talk about something like the cunt.co.nz
domain in front of someone as quiet and reserved as Cathy. So we all headed back to our respective homes and/or places of rest for the night and had a snooze.

We walked back up Fitzroy Street to Catherine’s car. Merlin and I said kept going to St Kilda Junction, remembering with some nostalgia the cool huge Coke sign that used to be there, and caught the tram home.

On Sunday Merlin and I met up with some of his mates from Canberra and went to the footy: Hawthorn versus St Kilda at the ‘G. Merlin and I both grew up in St Kilda, so we decided to support them today. It was something of a massacre - Hawthorn pounded St Kilda into the ground in a major way, and I was glad to be only supporting them for today!

Then tonight I made myself truly the most awesome bolognaise sauce ever. Okay, so maybe I think it was better than it really was because the previous meal had been an MCG hotdog, but I don’t think so. No, it was still good. Mince, tomato, Paul Newman’s sauce, and mushroom, and I let it simmer for… oooh.. about an hour and a half or so, maybe longer. Damn it was good! I hope the leftovers in the freezer taste half as good.

You might think that the big monolithic corporations are the ones who got that way by giving their customers what they want, and taking vast amounts of cash in the process. But it seems to me that some big corporations get so big that they move so slow that it’s a wonder that they’re still profitable.

Around a month ago now, I decided on two things:

1. I decided I was going to dabble in the stock market. With the current price descent into the depths, especially for technology stocks, I thought it might be a good time to pick up a few bargains. After all, an appalling number of my friends have made small fortunes in technology stocks, and even my mum has a share portfolio, so why shouldn’t I attempt to join in the fun?
2. I decided I was going to ditch my Internet account, and get cable Internet instead. After all, the price has dropped to the point where it actually costs about the same as my current modem Internet access and the dedicated phone line I run it on. But the cable is around twenty times faster, and has absolutely no logon time limit.

So, I got onto Commonwealth Securities, printed off an application form, and sent it off. And I got onto the Bigpond Advance web site, and filled out an online application.

And then I waited.

Within days, I got a note from the Australian Stock Exchange, noting that they had received a sponsorship for me from ComSec, which is apparently the thing to get to start trading. Just one problem: it was addressed to the wrong house number. There was a digit missing. Someone had figured out where the letter needed to be.

I e-mailed ComSec and asked them to change it. They e-mailed straight back to say, effectively, that "your e-mail is in a queue, and will be answered shortly". Great - I was on e-mail hold.

In fact, they phoned me the next day, and the bloke explained that they couldn’t change my address without it being in writing. I said they’d got it wrong from my application form, and couldn’t they check it? He said the form was somewhere in the system, and would not emerge for several weeks. Seriously! And this is the company revolutionising the share market in Australia through its online trading!

Okay, so I could write a letter. I asked what my account number was. He asked what my password was. I told him. Why this wasn’t enough to initiate the correction to my address without a letter, I don’t know.

It was all beginning to resemble Ron & Jeff’s adventures ordering a pizza. But I wrote the letter, and about a week later, TWO letters from the ASX arrived, confirming the change. One to the correct address, one to the wrong one, which again someone had forwarded on.

The only problem is that many weeks after this, ComSec themselves still haven’t sent me any information about my account, and how I can use it. I’ll keep waiting, though with dozens of other companies I can trade through, I might lose my patience eventually…

Meanwhile over at Telstra Bigpond, one could be forgiven for thinking that they’ve got ComSec handling their application forms. I haven’t heard anything from them. Not a peep. Unfortunately the opposition company, Optus, won’t wire up flats, so I’m stuck waiting until they get their act together.

Stay tuned, I’ll let you know when I actually hear something from either of these two monoliths.

By the way, for those reading who have long memories, the carpet shop that took over the Pot Spot’s location has just closed down. As a retail site, I reckon that spot is doomed.