I apologise to the people who keep coming back here only to find that I haven't updated the site. Finding something worthy of comment can be a challenge, despite a lot of things happening recently. For the larger part this week's been unproductive, but I have managed to complete a few tasks, so it doesn't feel completely wasted :)



Now for a rant...

I have probably talked about this before, but over the last two years I've seen a steady decline in customer service levels. Often I find that I'll enter a store and be treated with utter disinterest by the sales-people. In larger department stores it's more likely that staff members will be chatting to each other in an out-of-the-way corner than providing any service to potential or existing customers.

This isn't limited to the retail market, it's starting to happen everywhere. Have you contacted your local council lately? I've found that the staff members have no real interest in what you're saying, but occasionally you'll find someone that is helpful and genuinely interested in the query you have. To put it in simple terms, occasionally you'll stumble across someone that's actually doing his or her job. I think councillors and council staff members have forgotten that their entire purpose is to help the community.

This also happens at fast food businesses, which on occasions make me wonder if someone is out the back hunting and catching whatever you ordered.

McDonalds, despite its food not really tasting great, does usually have excellent customer service. KFC on the other hand is very poor and I feel the staff must never have been told that they are being paid to provide fast and friendly service. Walking into a KFC is akin to entering another reality, one in which everything happens in slow motion and devoid of enthusiasm. The local McDonalds can be quite poor once they hit 24 hour mode, but I won't bore you with the many stories I have of excessive waiting times and lacking professionalism.

Many other service-based businesses seem to have fallen into the same trap. Have you ever had a repair/installation/service person turn up on time, or at all?

Here's a list of phrases that staff will tell you over the phone that will rarely be true:

"We're aware of the problem and it's currently our top priority."
"Yes, that'll be delivered today."
"I'll check into that and call you back shortly."
"I'll have [insert name here], our [insert stupid job title here], check that out and they'll call you back tomorrow."
"Oh, yes that problem has affected a few people but it was just fixed. It should be working for you nnn.............ow."
"We can't help you with that, you'll have to call our other department."
"Sorry, it's not possible to have those on the same account."
"That service isn't available any more, despite it being in our brochure."
"Your call is important to us."

That last one is so widely recognised as being false that they should just say "We'll get to you eventually, just shut up and listen to the music."

Perhaps I'm cynical, but I'm tired of being lied to by people that I'm handing my money over to. As they say, consumers should vote with their feet on such matters, and go somewhere else where the service is better, which I do often. Unfortunately that's not always possible when there are no other options.

On to brighter subjects.

It was Australia Day yesterday and I've been in Brisbane for the weekend. It's been pretty relaxing, but quite hot (particularly today). I had the time to drop around to see Splash (and of course Charly) again, which is good - it's always nice to stay in touch :) I handed across my old G400 MAX, which still does a great job when it comes to image quality and its dual screen features. Also, Sony have just 'announced' that they're ending the production of their 17" and 19" CRT range (and I assume their 15" also), in favour of moving to only LCD production for those screen sizes. That should happen at the end of March and might mean a drop in price for their LCD range. Hopefully Sony Australia will now consider introducing their larger sized LCDs, 20.1" 1600x1200 for example, but I won't hold my breath ;)

I say this every year, but I'd really prefer if it was Winter again :) The SOI (Southern Oscillation Index - the atmospheric pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin) is heading to positive values again, which means wetter weather, or La Niña syndrome. If we're lucky and the trend continues, we'll have a monsoon season starting near the end of next month.

The sale of our old unit went through smoothly last week, so that's out of the way and another thing that can be rubbed off the list of current issues. No more prison patrolling by Ms Brown (inside joke).

More updates later!

P.S. Subway continues to rock me. So does Fasta Pasta.

is why they put those little stickers on them.

What's so special about apples? Why do they deserve stickers more than, say, bananas (which in my opinion, have a more interesting name, too - ba-na-na!)?

If it's to differentiate between different types of apples, then you'd expect the same thing has to happen with other fruits, like bananas, oranges, watermellons and grapes. No one reads those things anyway, they just peel them off and throw them away, or stick them to some out-of-the-way place where other apple stickers are hiding, building their apple sticker colony.

Or, accidentally eat them with the apple.

I suppose it's a form of advertising. Maybe apples are going to need agents soon, to get them press interviews and TV spots.

I don't get it.

Everything's in and working well. After a couple of cable problems (parallel ATA cables have never been long enough), I went and bought a longer ATA cable, which solved the issue :)

Ah, sitting out on the balcony of our new unit right now. The sun has just set, leaving the sky a pale blue and the clouds a dusty shale, with tinges of pink and orange. It's a nice view from here, one that I could get used to, with the trees, buildings and sky stretching out from me while the city buildings to the left reach up in clusters from the horizon.

Today's been pretty busy, and so was yesterday. We left early and arrived here to clean out the last of the remaining bits and pieces from our old unit, as well as meeting with the real estate agent to finalise its contract. The building inspection went through no problems and the contract settles on the 24th. Unless something else comes up, it's smooth sailing.

We've also made a few changes to our new unit, moving some more things in and assembling desks and other furniture. Today my brother's new TV arrived (a new Sony 80cm Wega) and getting it up the stairs wasn't as much trauma as I'd imagined. The box is huge, about 0.7 of a cubic metre and 90 kg in weight. It hasn't been unpacked because he's waiting on its stand to be delivered.

After a phone call to Umart, I picked up my new 120 GB hard drive and DVD-ROM, since I was in the area anyway. I'll no doubt install it tomorrow night when we arrive home (or earlier if we leave in the morning as planned; things never go to plan, though ;)

It'll be very nice to have that extra storage space for my collection of files. Having a consistently working DVD-ROM will be good as well, though I have gone with the same manufacturer (at least on an OEM level), which probably isn't the wisest of decisions. It's a slot load drive instead of a tray – handy as it won't get in the way of my burner.

The holidays are over for me now. I didn't really officially have any holidays because I've been fielding client requests and doing a little work, but I'd never planned to set aside any specific period of time for a break. Work will start again on Monday, coding my new side project (which I'll release at the end of the month). I feel that this year will be one of progress in many areas :)

My new phone arrived yesterday and is all that I'd wanted and more. It's very easy to handle and use. The predictive text input is tricky to get used to but it saves a huge amount of time, and already I've been fiddling with the phone using IrDA with my laptop.

My order from Umart still hasn't been finalised, or at least I haven't received any more about it. I think I'll ring them up tomorrow and see what the hold up is. One thing's certain, it won't be here until mid next week now.

My foot has repaired itself from last weekend some more. Now I can walk without having to hold my foot at strange angles or hop around like an amputee :D

Things are crusing along pretty well. I heard back from a client that didn't want to pay up, but whether they still will is totally uncertain. It's frustrating... as if you'd gone to work for someone and they just decided not to pay you for your last month because they didn't feel like it. I'll just have to wait and see what happens. I have another client like that at the moment too, but far less money is involved so I'm not overly concerned - it's for the principle of it.

I was surfing around the web the other day and stumbled across this website which I thought was pretty cool. It's long exposure night photography of places in the deserts of the US, where entire towns have been abandoned to bake away in the harsh sun for eternity. Interesting shots of plane graveyards, old hotels and neon signs.

A lot has been happening in the last week!

Firstly, we went to a birthday party for friends of ours from down the street. He has a Yamaha 'stand up style' Jet Ski. We'd all never tried the stand up style ones which are quite difficult to balance on (the sit down jet skis are simple to use and difficult to fall off). Everyone had quite a bit of trouble with anything more than just kneeling, but surprisingly myself and everyone else I got the hang of kneeling and standing on it straight away and was soon blasting around the bay >:) It's was a lot of fun and I wish I'd had more time to have a play and do some more daring moves. The only bad part was when I got off and sliced my foot open on submerged razor-like rocks. It still hasn't really joined back together properly. I also got a bit sunburnt but that's a good thing - I'm sure my body is rapidly producing vitamin D ;)

I've been bidding on a few auctions and a few days ago successfully purchased a new Nokia 5210 to replace my old 5110. Although the model numbers are only slightly different, the 5210 is in the 82xx range when it comes to features. The main reason for buying it though is its size and weight - far less cumbersome than my current phone to carry around. Hopefully the phone will arrive in the next couple of days (paid for, haven't heard back from the seller with regards to its postage).

I've also ordered a new 120 GB Western Digital hard drive with an 8 MB cache. I've been downloading so many interesting things in the past few months over ADSL that I'm running out of space to store it all. There are a couple of problems with the order though, so it'll be a few more days before I receive that. I'm trying to add a new DVD-ROM drive to the existing order but because the ordering system is fairly manual I'm going to have to wait for them to see my e-mail. My old DVD-ROM is starting to fail when reading discs and has even completely disappeared from the hardware manager a few times, as well has exhibiting a strange disc 'clunk' stopping problem too. They also messed up the price of the hard drive and charged me the full retail price instead of the internet special price. I guess they slipped up because they have so many back-orders to complete from over the Christmas break.

My dad has been cleaning out the garage... slowly. It's like a trinket shop in there... a cramped one where even the store owner can't find what he's looking for any more. It's taken him days to put everything away and clean it up, but to me it looks no different. For two nights in a row he's declared "I'll have it finished tonight!", only to disappear and not been seen again for hours. He can be his own worst enemy in the garage, which he emphatically refers to as "the shed", because he's unable to throw away even the most useless of items. "No, I need to keep that, you never know when you're going to need one of those! If I throw it out, one day I'll be doing something and need it and I'll think, I should have kept that!"

Little does he know that I've probably sneaked it into the bin while he wasn't watching ;)

My brother is meanwhile playing Grand Prix 4 (he's addicted to it and to some extent so am I), a game given to us by our oldest brother for Christmas. We've had a lot of problems getting it to be stable. There's a long story attached to it but basically while trying to make it more stable I installed a bunch of Windows Recommended Updates which in turn removed my ability to use my keyboard and mouse (even a PS/2 keyboard), which meant that I could no longer log in! So, reformat time it was. Everything's basically back to normal now, except for OpenGL on my primary monitor. I have to disable the secondary to get it working, which means that playing Q3A while I chat in mIRC is out of the question. I think the real problem was actually an audio driver (once Aureal 3D died there were only early beta drivers for use with Windows 2000), and the game is running pretty well except for the occasional random termination - at least it's not hanging the OS now (a pretty severe thing to happen to Windows 2000 - aside from GP4 it's been so stable that I haven't been able to crash it deliberately).

We've had some more rain which has helped the lawn grow and watered in the top soil that was spread just before Christmas. Unlike last year I feel that this year is going to be a wet one. It seems about time we had some heavy rain, with the last few years being drier than normal. People have been calling it a draught, but the truth is that Australia has and always will have low rainfalls away from the coast.

I can smell the roast dinner cooking in the kitchen, so I'm going to end this off now and go help :)

Welcome to 2003, let's hope that this year is better than 2002 and 2001!

The last few days I've been in Brisbane helping to move my brother from our old unit to our new unit. Down 16 stairs and up 32, hundreds of times... it soon wears you out, but it was worth it. In a strange way, although the new unit is further up (in floors), the stairs take less energy out of you. I think it's the height of each stair that does it... the old unit must have been designed for short people or something. The stairs in the new unit are in an atrium that is pentagonally shaped, which means there is a wrap-around landing at each floor. It's a cool design and it makes carrying heavy objects much easier.

We've also managed to get a contract on our old unit for sale, so pending a building inspection, it'll be out of our hands :)

While in Brisbane I had the chance (late at night after a long day of moving) to see The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It's more epic than the first and was very enjoyable. I want to go and see it again! Having not read any of the books, the movies are rewarding, intricate and surprising. They probably don't contain the detail of the books, but it wouldn't be practical to produce a movie that matched scene by scene to a book; a movie that matched a book wouldn't flow well (plus, TLOTR movies are already three hours each).

My relatives were up here for New Years Eve, which is another tradition that has formed in recent years. We gathered at the rock outlet on the beach again at midnight for our little celebration... it's all good fun :)

And as this day closes, I hope everyone has a great 2003.