October 30th, 2006

Finished reading iWoz, written by Steve Wozniak last night. I picked the book up a few days before i left Rocky to come home to Inverell.

The book starts out pretty slow but does come through with the goods. Ive always known Woz was involved with Apple from the start, but i never really realised what exactly he did do. Reading about how he created the Apple I, Apple II, the floppy drive, etc amazed me. The guy must be one smart cookie thats for sure.

The second part of the book is a lot more interesting then the first in my opinion and the last 2 chapters close the book off well.

Well worth the read for Apple fans. Non Apple fans might not be as interested, but i would encourage them to at least give it a try… Woz did pioneer the personal computer as we know it.

Went around to try to help a guy fix his adsl connection this arvo. Turns out i couldnt do much even after spending an hour or so fiddling with 2 different modems. In the end i went back to the default ‘bigpond provided’ modem *piece of shit*, put in the bigpond provided cd and then went through the setup. After stepping through the whole process, from plugging in the cables, plugging in the network card, turning on the modem, etc I got a wonderful message saying “the setup program could not connect your modem to bigpond”.

Bloody wonderful. In other words there was somthing wrong with the BigPond provided service *as usual*.

Mum and I left the place, having made no progress at all. No doubt the guy has a nice evening of sitting in the BigPond tech support queue to eventually get answered by someone with a strong accent who is going to tell him to reboot his modem and restart his PC.

I often wonder how much money BigPond make from ADSL connections that arent actually in use by the people who are paying for it because there is some kind of problem with the service. My guess is its a fair amount.

I also often wonder how many unsecured wireless internet connections there are around Australia from the dodgy piece of crap modems BigPond provide by default. None of the ones ive seen have any kind of firewall or wireless security enabled and from what ive seen the setup program doesnt mention anything about it either.

Keep up the good work Telstra /sigh