Venice, Paris, The Hague, Blackpool, and Orlando photos are now, FINALLY, online at icypole.net and automaticfocus.net.

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Yes.

Why does the UK love this man? He doesn't even let his bizarrely good guests speak, or makes it all about him. Do not understand.

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I realise its been a long while, but I've been bored with facebook, photo processing and twitter for a while, and on top of being away and actually busy at work unlike that last place makes for poor communication.

I flew back to Australia recently in Virgin Atlantic's Premium Economy. As a 6ft4 male, the difference between this and absolute cattle class was night and day. I actually managed to sleep a few hours, the movies were good, the food was a bit better, the pre flight and post dinner drinks were a very nice touch, and the promised fruit bowl even made the rounds.

On top of this, on the way back we got upgraded to Upper Class for the Sydney to Hong Kong leg. Fantastic! A small taster for the trip next year when we are doing it all upper class thanks to points upgrades.

Virgin Atlantic Premium Economy comes highly recommended!! (unlike their standard economy which I found to be terrible between Orlando and London earlier this year).

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Is Abercrombie and Fitch the most pretentious retail experience in London? Hey I like their stuff, but its strictly web shopping or USA shops for me. I think the two staff members constantly swaying on the mezzanine in some sort of weird dance troupe, not to mention the boys at the door who just get in the way swung it for me. Any other contenders?


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How does a pay subscription service have such rotten webmail? Apple's MobileMe offering is something I generally find quite useful, but giving that IMAP is blocked at a lot of companies, I have to use webmail to compose anything of much length. MobileMe's web mail is absolutely horrid. Miscellaneous refreshes, failures to send, no HTML composing. Every other offering in the product is strong, why is the web mail so bad?


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Back on the 22nd of April, I posted about a new chapter. Wow. What a difference. It's not the role I thought I was going to, and I'm not doing my absolute ideal role, but wow. To get away from that previous mis-managed incompetence ridden hell hole was a blessing from somewhere magical. Call it heavenly, karmic (thanks Earl), or just good frickin luck, thank goodness for the move. I've even learning some Powershell for use with VMWare ESX (its good shit).

Goodbye you miserable place, you paid well, drank my soul, and I escaped!


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So I followed on from a friend (his review), and bought a 256 GB Samsung SSD for my unibody MacBook Pro. My main concern, which wasn’t price, was the fact that I was dropping back to a 256 GB drive, away from the 500 GB I currently had in the laptop. After some investigations and lesson learning when it came to iPhoto and Aperture photo archiving, I gave way and ordered it.

In short, here is a list of my before and after times for a few standard operations:
Operation -> HD Time -> SSD Time (seconds)
Boot -> 64 -> 35
Aperture Load -> 15 -> 4
Vmware XP Boot -> 49 -> 29
Vmware Outlook 07 Start -> 31 -> 9
Excel -> 18 -> 8
iTunes -> 10 -> 2
Safari -> 9 -> 1

So in short, its fantastic. I chose the Samsung as its a model Apple use in their stock, and for its decent performance and reliability (have never seen any of those nasty locks/hangs reported with this drive).

There is some negatively about SSD still out there, but for a laptop and personal use I think they are fantastic. The most significant upgrade I have done since shifting from Vista on a VAIO to a Macbook.

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Carphone Warehouse only have themselves to blame for the fact lots of people were lined up in the O2 stores last Friday morning for the iPhone 3GS while initially they were empty. Ok, they still sold their stock, but the first sales guy said to me “for some reason people think when using us they have to port their number from O2, to another operator, and then back”. I set him straight by telling him that in fact a staff member just down the road in a CPW told me exactly that last week. Then, after spending all day without the 3GS working, I rang O2 who ported the number from one SIM to another within 3 minutes of the call (they couldn’t see CPW’s port request in the queue). So thanks for the new hardware Carphone Warehouse, but your staff are totally useless (and perhaps they could stop telling me over and over again they weren’t on commission during the three attempts to flog me £13.99 insurance). No means No.

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Florida was fantastic. A few thunderstorms but otherwise warm strong sunshine, swimming pools, and rollercoasters. Awesome! We went to Disneyland, Busch Gardens, Discovery Cove, Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios all in a week and yet still got in some important BBQ-ing, pool, and beer time. We even managed outlet shopping, mini golf and Manny’s Chophouse (possibly the highlight of the whole trip!). Photos on websites to follow.


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I really like Virgin Media for TV choice and its great for Sky to have a competitor, but please for the love of content give us some HD channels!! HD is simply woeful on Virgin, and having the BBC channel and On-demand doesn’t cut it in 2009!

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Forgot to add that Positano and Les Arcs photos are now up on icypole.net and automaticfocus.net.



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T-1 until a long weekend in Cornwall ...
T-15 work days left ...
T-23 days to Florida (give or take Swine Flu) ...
T-86 to the Darts in Blackpool (don’t even ask!) ...
T-134 to Australia again ...
T-360 days to the wedding ...



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Its time for a new chapter (it has been time for a while), and as such I am leaving my current employer in 4 weeks and moving on...

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You leave your backpack (with all your passports) on the train when you get off at Clapham Junction. Therefore the passports (not to mention camera equipment) travel all the way to Waterloo without you. Not only will you probably miss the flight, but also completely stuff up your visa appointment the next Wednesday.
Amazingly, I had a super helpful woman at Clapham (Claire), who was very efficient. She found out which platform at Waterloo my train ended up at, got the guard to find the bag, and I was able to then pick it up from Waterloo and rush back down to Gatwick to make the flight. When I was young this is the kind of thing I’d expect out of my parents (sorry!). I’ll be losing keys and sunglasses any day now.

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Yesterday (it is now Sunday and I’m still rolling around the flat), we went to what is officially (at the time of typing), the second best restaurant in the world. Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck in Bray (a posh name for being near Maidenhead). I had questioned whether this lunch was going to be worth the huge prices that are paid for the tasting menu and matched wine, and I must say that personally (and I was the only one of four with this opinion), that I did not enjoy the scrambled egg flavoured ice cream. Other than that, it was simply stunning. A nitro-poaching sense-smashing 5 hours of fun (yes 5 hours!). Rating? Im going with 4.5 out of 5 stars, something inside of me had to knock half a star off for the price, but everything else was amazing.

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It has been a while since I wrote anything, and to be honest if there is someone who looks at this once every three months outside of my family I’d be surprised but here I am. What have I been up to? Well, I have an appointment for my Indefinite Leave to Remain application next month, I’m running a Mac Mini under the TV as a media center, and I’ve been running (probably jogging) more than I ever have in my life before. What does this all mean? Basically, I’m still in the same job (till end of June), things are about the same, I’m a bit lighter and fitter, but on the whole I think I’d just like to go live in the snow with a group of friends for three months. As for pictures of the last trip, and blogging, twitter, facebook etc, I’m feeling all a little jaded about the web and its surrounds at the moment, I’m sure it will pass.

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Well it has been a full day with Mobile Me, and here are 10 things I dislike in no particular order:

• Mobile Me on Windows won’t sync with Outlook that connected to Exchange
• No other date format on Mobile Me web mail except for the US
• Webmail won’t sort by date with newest at the top (it can’t be changed but doesn’t remember the sorting).
• Syncing the most recent 50 messages on your iPhone doesn’t always give you the 50 most recent (a random section of 50 in 2007 pop up in one of my folders).
• No Reply-To address configurable. This is really annoying!
• Battery Life. Push is hard on battery life, so it would be great if I could use fetch instead (as my information isn’t overly urgent). Fetch can be used for mail, but not calendar and contacts.
• Odd Pushing. New mails seem to push down close to right away, but if I read them or delete them on mail.app, that update seems to take forever to propagate to my phone.
• The experiment continues...

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So after using Activesync with Exchange at work on my iPhone for ages, I’ve now switched over to a trial MobileMe subscription. I couldn’t activesync over the air at work anymore, so I thought I’d give it a go (two months for free so it cant hurt). So far so good with two caveats.

• You can’t sync from a PC to the MobileMe cloud if your Outlook is connected to an Exchange server (eg. your PC at work). This is a large annoyance, but I’m getting around it as Entourage on my Mac will sync with iCal.
• Push. You can set it to push sync or manual. Where is Fetch? For calendar and contacts (as I’m using google for mail) push isn’t required (and flattens the battery), so I’d like it to fetch every hour or so which it can’t. So I’m using manual. It syncs whenever I launch the specific application on the iphone.

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This was such a good idea when I started, but due to relative boredom I’ve been more busy on Facebook and Twitter. In some ways both of those also have the potential to annoy me greatly, and yet have been keeping me busy during the day to day malaise. Twitter is slightly less invasive as it’s really just micro blogging. Off to Forest this weekend for the big game against Derby, boooo sheep shaggers!!

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Snow again in London this morning, and the excuses to not make work have started. Not much snow really, just a half inch dusting or so but clearly they have run out of grit as all the tube platforms had snow sitting on them and the A4 was a pile of slush! BBC say it should give out sometime this morning so hopefully getting home is no problem.

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The snow in London has been amazing, today, at least 6 inches had settled this morning and its snowing again now on Tuesday evening. Diana has put some pictures up on her website and I’ve got a few on this page.

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My first set of Egypt and Jordan photos are now on automaticfocus.net.
Update: icypole.net now live!

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We are back from our Egypt and Jordan experience, and it was certainly an experience. Lets start of with the negative, because it should not overshadow what was an amazing experience it was, it is just a pity that this was in spite of the tour company Peregrine rather than with their help.
The Nile Cruise boat we were on was very poorly maintained and cleaned (I wont go into the graphic detail I could), and the Jordan tour leader didn’t even have a remote interest in the basics (emergency contact details/feedback etc) and was more interested in getting himself fed first at every stop, and didn’t bother to ask anyone’s name. The one thing that did go right in fairness was all the transport options which did work as expected (buses/trains/transfers).
Now onto the sights: The Giza Pyramids, Saqqara, Karnak Temple, Luxor, Valley of the Kings, Aswan, Abu Simbel, Petra, Wadi Rum and the Dead Sea to name but a small few were absolutely fantastic (I will put some pictures up on icypole and automaticfocus shortly) and despite the complaints I do not regret this holiday one little bit, but I would say two things. 1) Do not use Peregrine for this trip. 2) Egypt is very poor, and very poorly maintained so keep this is mind before you go.
Lastly in this short summary, I’d like to say thanks to our tour group, who were all fantastic and absolutely made the trip despite the other pitfalls we all shared along the way. We were extremely lucky to have their company.

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A Merry New Year and Happy Christmas and all that. I have spent my eating season once again in London with a fantastic Christmas lunch put on by some prominent Adelaide orphans and Im now preparing for New Year’s Eve with the folks in law to be (or some other more politically correct phrase). I still have two and a half weeks until returning to the muppet show and I hope it seems like an eternity, although give the current climate, the number of people I know out of contracts, and the exchange rate (2.06 english pounds to 1 aussie dollar?!?!), even the muppet show may not be such a bad place to be. (I reserve the right to change that opinion the first day back!)

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1 day until one month off from work. Did I say woohoo already? Woohoo. Probably the most mentally required break I’ve ever had!

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Tomorrow I have to take the Life in the UK test. I hopefully pass this and then provide the proof in my application for Indefinite Leave to Remain. I can understand why I should know about equal rights in the UK, when elections are held, what kind of democracy the UK has, and even how laws are passed, but for what reason do I need to memorise facts such as how many members there are of the Welsh Assembly, or what % of the population is Jewish/West Indian etc? Anyone? Relevance? Please? (I doubt most UK born and bred residents know those answers, but if you ask me who is top of the Premier League or what the UK interest rate is I’ve got you covered). Update: I passed thankfully!

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Counting the clock down the December 19th. End of contract day, but no matter what happens I’ll be off for about a month anyway. Pity I won’t be able to fit a ski trip in there somewhere, will just have to wait till March!

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So this would be my first actual blog. Ok so I have some travel style blogs with my attempt at photography (usually rushed), but I haven’t ever actually blogged it. I don’t know what I might end up saying, or how often I might end up saying it (or if in fact I can even voice most of my frustrations seen as I wouldn’t want to name names). Lets see what happens!

Im using Rapidweaver 4.2 and the Blog-Funky theme on a 2008 MacBook Pro with OS X 10.5.5 to get the job done with as little pain as possible.

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