December, 2006

Well the [Wii](http://wii.nintendo.com/) was certainly a hit over xmas. Pretty much everyone who visited had a go, even those who who would never play a video game in their lives. WiiSports is the reason it is so popular. Tennis seems to be the most played game, followed closely by bowling. boxing and golf would come in next with baseball coming in at the ‘least popular’ position.

Boxing has really grown on me. It seems there is more to it then just randomly swinging the controllers as fast as you can (even though this strategy seems to work ok, up until around 400-500 skill level). I only recently got to pro status (> 1000 skill) in boxing and it seems to just get better and better. The higher you go, the more you have to defend and dodge and time your punches. It’s a lot of fun. I’m currently stuck on the ‘Matt’ computer opponent around 1600 skill level. No matter what I do, he seems to always do some insane combo which knocks me senseless. More research needed I think.

Through all the fun there has been a few incidents:

1 broken controller – mum playing tennis, running across the room and swinging into the wall. Motion sensor wouldn’t work. Could still point and click buttons, but no tilt sensing.

1 scratched controller – dad, tennis, swing and hit the light above his head.

1 house light fuse – same incident as above, hitting the light blew the fuse for some reason.

Overall it has been a lot of fun. [Nintendo](http://www.nintendo.com/) have done well with this system, bringing computer gaming to the masses.

According to [engadget](http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/aacs-drm-cracked-by-backuphddvd-tool/), the encryption scheme used on the relatively new HD-DVD format has already been cracked.

All the money that must be spent on new copy protection schemes just seems wasted to me. It takes someone a relatively small amount of time to find some way around it. Why don’t they spend the money on research as to WHY people copy media, instead of just throwing money at the bottomless pit that is ‘new copy protection schemes’.

As far as I’m concerned, It’s all bits (1’s and 0’s). No copy protection scheme is unbreakable.

Well christmas has been and gone. Was a good one though. no doubt about it. A few close family members came around and had lunch at Mum and Dad’s place. It was actually raining, which was weird for this time of year in Australia, but it made the baked dinner go down even better.

Was Harrys first christmas and will definitely be one of the more memorable ones considering there were no dramas.

Overall a pretty casual christmas, really awesome.

Posting from my Wii. Internet channel was released today and it works pretty well.
Typing with the Wiimote is pretty slow though

I’m pleasantly surprised with the [Bank of America](http://www.bankofamerica.com/) telephone customer support. I’ve had a Bank of America account since being over in the US for my internship with [Apple](http://www.apple.com/). When I left, I decided to leave the account open in order for any last pay to go in and also for my US tax return to go in.

Recently, I tried accessing internet banking and found that my password was not accepted. I tried resetting it but kept getting ‘Unable to access your accounts at this time’ messages. In the end I bit the bullet and called up the internet banking support line.

I got a lady on the other end who was the most pleasant and helpful telephone based support person I have ever had. She was extremely helpful and friendly and assisted me in a happy manner. It actually sounded like she enjoyed her job! After verifying my details, she went ahead and found out that internet banking on my account had been disabled for some reason. She soon re-enabled it and everything was working again. I got off the phone feeling better than when I called, simply because of the way she interacted on the phone.

Jump ahead to today and I find that once again my internet banking accounts ‘cannot be accessed’. I have a feeling this time that I entered the username or password incorrectly but could not verify as I left all that information in Rockhampton. Since I also wanted to find out about closing the account, I decided to ring the support line again.

This time a guy answered and I was actually surprised to hear that he was even more helpful and friendly than the previous lady. He went out of his way to be extremely helpful and make things as easy as possible for me. When he had to put me on hold for a few mins, he would come back online every so often saying that he was still looking into it and wouldn’t be long. No recorded messages, no annoying ‘on hold’ music. He sorted everything out and answered all my questions. He even mentioned that if I was charged any fees during the transfer of my funds to simply mention his name and the fees would be waived.

It kind of says something about my experiences with telephone support in general when I get off calls like this feeling as though they are special and rare. Shouldn’t this type of service be standard for any business that offers support services?

I can’t remember any other telephone support calls I’ve had that even come close to the two I’ve received when calling Bank of America.

On the Dalby to Inverell leg of my trip home for xmas, the cassette player in my trusty stock standard [mazda](http://www.mazda.com.au/) cassette/radio player started playing up. If I put a tape in (or in this particular case, the cassette adaptor for my ipod) it would constantly switch sides. On a few occasions the tape even got stuck inside. I tried with a normal tape as well and the same thing happened.

So, just out of Dalby, with a good 4 hours left to drive I was stuck listening to whatever radio I could find. In a lot of areas I could tune into [Triple J](http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/) which was good, but definitely wasn’t a substitute for my trusty iPod.

Anyway, today Dad and I went down to the local [Super Cheap Auto](http://www.supercheapauto.com.au/) here in Inverell in search of a new stereo.

When it comes to audio equipment for the car, I am more of a practical person than an audiophile. If it plays what I want than I am happy. I have no real wish to have expensive speakers and sub-woofers and what-not. My only real concern was getting something that I could plug my iPod in to, preferably one with a 3.5mm stereo jack connection so I didn’t have to have a cassette player/adapter.

I hadn’t read up on stereos of anything, so I was actually pretty surprised to find one that did actually have a 3.5mm audio input jack right on the front panel. They had a few models there, but the Sony ones where the only ones with the audio input jack. The [JVC](http://www.jvc.com.au/) models said they were ‘iPod ready’, but I would have needed to buy a separate ‘iPod connection kit’ which ended up only having the iPod connector and not a standard 3.5mm plug. The [Kenwood](http://www.kenwood.com.au/) models mentioned nothing about ‘iPod connection’ or ‘aux input’ so they didn’t even get a look in.

In the end, after weighing up all the options, I went with a Sony CDX-GT250S. RRP $299.00, but I got it for $199.00. It supports all I want including:

* Support for CD/CDR
* Support for MP3/WMA
* AUX In

It doesn’t look too shabby either.

After getting it home, Dad helped me put it in. After a small hick-up with the front left speaker, it was working.

Overall I’m pretty happy with it. It looks cool in the dash of my car, it works well and it’s simple to connect my iPod to. I’m not sure what the general consensus is with [Sony XPlod](http://www.xplodsony.com/) systems and I don’t really care, as long as it plays my music I’ll be happy.

I’m almost certain I did up a list of my favourite ‘must have’ mac apps on this blog, but for the life of me I cannot find it. I guess it doesn’t matter though since it would be old now and definitely needs updating.

So here it is, my list of ‘must have’ mac apps. Apps I use everyday and love using. Listed in no particular order.

[AppZapper](http://www.appzapper.com/)
I don’t know how I went without this app for so long. Drag an app you no longer want installed onto the AppZapper window and it will scan for all those annoying preference, cache, library files that are usually left behind when simply dragging the app to the trash.
Select the items in the list, and hit the ‘zap’ button to remove all of them in one hit. No more left over preference files!

[TextMate](http://macromates.com/)
I’m a text editor junky, or rather, I was. I’ve tried a heap of them, [BBEdit](http://www.barebones.com/), [TextWrangler](http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/), [Smultron](http://smultron.sourceforge.net/), [SubEthaEdit](http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/), yet none of them appeal to me as much as TextMate. I think the main thing that sets it apart from the others is the bundle support and it seems to have an awesome community behind it. Now it is my text editor of choice.

[XCode](http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/xcode/) + [Interface Builder](http://developer.apple.com/tools/interfacebuilder.html)
I like programming on the mac, therefore I use the dev tools. Simple as that really. XCode and Interface builder are nice to use as well.

[Mail](http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/)
I like Mail. It’s simple and easy to use and supports everything I so far have needed to do with it. Things like [MailTags](http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html) and [MailAct-On](http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html) only add to Mail to make it a pretty cool app. On a side note, if you like mail you gotta check out [Hawk Wings](http://www.hawkwings.net/). It’s a Mail lovers dream site with heaps of awesome tips and add-on info.

[Adium](http://www.adiumx.com/)
Probably the most popular multi-client instant messaging app for the mac. It’s a very slick program and sits nicely in my dock. I use it whenever I am not expecting multiple group chats at the same time. Unfortunately it has a nasty bug with multiple group conversations that causes all messages from all group chats to display in a single chat window. Making it impossible to use. It is a known bug, but is not planned to be fixed until 1.5. With 1.0 the current milestone in development, I’m not holding my breath for a fix anytime soon.

[MSN messenger](http://www.microsoft.com/mac/DOWNLOAD/MISC/msn_messenger3.asp)
I hate its interface. I hate how it randomly ‘fails to deliver’ messages. I hate how it randomly disconnects due to ‘network issues’ but seems to be able to reconnect again straight away just fine. I hate how it is so far behind in features compared to the windows version. I hate pretty much everything about the ‘official’ MSN client for mac except for one small thing, It supports multiple group chats better then Adium. That is the only reason it is still on my mac.

[PhotoStickies](http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/photostickies/)
Only a new entry in my list. I got it as part of a [MacZot](http://maczot.com/) bundle. It basically lets you display images on your desktop above the standard wallpaper. You can choose the image, then scale it or add a filter to it and a lot of other things. I like it because I tend to get sick of my standard wallpaper quite frequently and with this I can have a wallpaper and also a bunch of other photos of family and stuff as well. I like it a lot.

[Google Notifier](http://mail.google.com/mail/help/notifier/)
A little menu extra that lets you know when you have new mail in your [gmail](http://gmail.google.com/) account. Also hooks into [google calendar](http://www.google.com/calendar) as well, but I’ve never used that part of it. I wish they would release a version that supports multiple gmail accounts. If you use gmail, you need this.

[Colloquy](http://colloquy.info/)
A free cocoa irc client. Nothing fancy, but handles the basics extremely well. I’ve tried other clients but none have the nice and simple UI that colloquy has.

[MenuCalendarClock](http://www.objectpark.net/mcc.html)
Another [MacZot](http://maczot.com/) bundle app. It displays a little day calendar in the menu that when clicked displays a month calendar. The neat thing is that it integrates with iCal and by hovering over the day you can see appointments and to-do items for that day. Great for quickly seeing what you have in ical without having to actually launch ical itself. The little month calendar comes in handy as well.

[NetNewsWire](http://www.newsgator.com/NGOLProduct.aspx?ProdID=NetNewsWire)
In my opinion, the best RSS feed aggregator for OS X. It has everything you could want in an RSS reader and more. [NewsFire](http://www.newsfirerss.com/) apparently gives it a run for its money, but with the few times I’ve tried it I’ve had crashes and general trouble with it. NetNewsWire all the way.

[Transmit](http://www.panic.com/transmit/) My FTP client of choice. It looks nice and works nice. Does the job and does it well. I only use it for basic uploading and downloading but it has oodles of other features that make it an awesome FTP client.

[VLC](http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html)
The ‘play all’ solution for media files on OS X. You get the odd file every now and then that doesn’t play properly but overall VLC will generally play pretty much anything you throw at it.

That finishes off my current ‘must have mac app’ list. I use most of these apps daily, and the rest weekly. They make the mac user experience even better.

EDIT:

Holy crap! How could I forget [Yojimbo](http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/index.shtml)?
Looking at my list again and it is actually on there, I just forgot to blog about it. oops.
So yeah, [Yojimbo](http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/index.shtml) is definitely on my list as well. I tried it back when it was first released and loved it, but for some reason I stopped using it until recently when [Luke](http://www.ldaley.com) mentioned that he was using it.
It suits my ‘write ideas in seperate text document’ organisational strategy really well, and makes it so easy to find what you are looking for. The recent addition of tag support makes it even better. It now contains all my notes and web-site logins and serial numbers that i had previously stored in my ‘~/Stuff/Misc text pdf’ and ‘In progress’ folders. Awesome app!

I’m a pro (1000+ skill level) at Tennis. Bowling I am around 850. The others (golf, baseball, boxing) I haven’t played enough to really get a decent skill rating.

Zelda is getting pretty good as well. I found it a bit slow at the start but it’s quiet enjoyable now. It’s amazing how well the control system works in Zelda. Hopefully other games that come out have the same amount of realism / control.

I brought it back home with me and so far Dad seems to like bowling. After 8 games he is already beating me. He really gets into it though

Mum has had 1 go, and seemed to get the hang of the controller pretty well. She even threw down a few strikes.

It’s still a lot of fun. It’s amazing how your wrist movement can affect the spin of the tennis ball / bowling ball. I actually work up quite a sweat when playing.

Should be good when others get back for xmas and we can arrange some tournaments

I’m back home again. Drove down earlier in the week and after staying a night at Dalby and taking care of some ‘tech support’ issues I was home around lunch time on Wednesday.

Things are coming together for xmas. Already been shopping with Mum to pick up some things.

My sisters come back sometime next week, Friday I think, so that should be good.

Christmas should be a lot of fun this year.

From [Hage-Ali gives up young Australian title](http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20926445-2702,00.html):
> IKTIMAL Hage-Ali has relinquished the title of NSW Young Australian of the Year following controversy surrounding her arrest over an alleged cocaine supply ring.

>Ms Hage-Ali, 22, who is a member of Prime Minister John Howard’s Muslim community Reference Group, was questioned and released last month by Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad detectives investigating an alleged cocaine supply ring.

I wonder what the original criteria are for selection as ‘NSW young Australian of the year’ ?

I’ve played [World of Warcraft](http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/) since closed beta. When the game was released I was at the shop first thing in the morning to pick up my pre-ordered copy and went about levelling up my characters.

2 years on and I took a ‘break’ from the game. I got sick of the mindless instance grinding, the repetitive end game, and in general the broken servers. It’s been maybe 6 months since I last played for any period of time. Sure I’ve logged in every few weeks to make sure everything is there, but I haven’t run any instances or what not.

I realised recently that I probably won’t ever play it again. It bores me silly now. Even the approaching [Burning Crusade](http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/) expansion release doesn’t really offer anything that I am overly interested in. In my experience, it’s just more of the same old grinding, farming and mindless quest doing.

Levelling from 60 to 70 might be fun. The new instances along the way may make the game a bit more interesting, but ultimately it’s going to be exactly the same at level 70 as it is currently at level 60. Mindless end game instance raiding, mindless farming and the same old ‘epics > skill’ metaphor that seems to be the driving force behind the game.

Recently a new patch has added a lot of ‘expansion ready’ content including new talent trees, arena pvp system, etc. Out of curiosity I logged in the other day and respec’d my 60’s, just to fiddle with the new talents trees. I even joined a few arena games to see what they are like. In the end I concluded that it’s still a waste of time.

2+ years on from release and the servers are still terrible. Constant server lag makes playing a total pain. Battleground queues are still insanely long. The new arena queues are better, but I think it’s only because the games are insanely fast since most people who pvp are fully epic’d out. I even got randomly booted off the server once while I was playing for no real reason.

So yeah, for me, World of Warcraft is pretty much a total waste of time now. Any new content being added is just the same old farm/grind that makes the game such a pain. I kind of hoped [Blizzard](http://www.blizzard.com/) could do more with World of Warcraft, since i really like the whole world/story behind it, but it doesn’t look like much is changing anytime soon.

I just wish Blizzard would go back to making off-line games. (Starcraft 2? Warcraft 4?) /sigh

No other PC games really spark my interest at the moment either except for [Spore](http://www.spore.com/), which looks totally awesome but isn’t due for release until sometime next year.

Been keeping busy since Melanie went back to America. Had to take care of some last minute xmas shopping which, at this time of year, is an absolute nightmare. Needless to say, I got it done as fast and painlessly as possible.

Looks like I’ll be heading back home early this week. At this stage I’m planning on heading off on Tuesday. Will be only going as far as Dalby on the first day to stop over and do some quick tech support. So I’ll probably be on the road to home on Wednesday morning. Dalby is only around 4 hours from home, so it will be a good short drive.

Haven’t read much lately, or worked on the latest coding ‘project’. I’m hoping to do some more work on it at home.

So yeah, pretty short update really. I’ve got a concise list of things to get done tomorrow which should be pretty easy to do, then I guess I will get into packing my clothes and stuff. I hate packing…

I pre-ordered my [Wii](http://wii.nintendo.com.au/) from [Target](http://www.target.com.au/) thinking it would be a rather painless process. The $600 of added coupons also helped in my decision.

I guess I should have known that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

(more…)

Melanie pitched in and helped me get a [Nintendo Wii](http://wii.nintendo.com/) as a late birthday / early xmas present. I pre-ordered from [Target](http://www.target.com.au/) in Rockhampton and after a bit of bungling on their behalf I was able to pick it up on release day.

It’s a lot of fun. The new controller makes the games really interactive. WiiSports is an awesome example of how gameplay > graphics, something SONY and Microsoft should really take notice of.

WiiSports is the most fun so far. It’s pretty amazing how well the controller responds. I find I’m better at tennis and bowling over golf, baseball and boxing.

Zelda seems like it should be pretty good as well.

What’s the deal with the default [MSN Messenger](http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.aspx?pid=msnmessenger) client for the Mac? I could rave on and on about this, so I decided that I will just write it all down in point form.

• No tabbed chat interface.
• Clunky / large UI.
• No web-cam, game, extended compatibility with windows client (could be seen as a good thing).
• Lagging behind features of the windows client.
• The “One or more messages could not be sent” message that shows up 5-10 min’s after you have just typed a lot of stuff. Giving no real indication what was, and what wasn’t, sent properly.
• Preferences aren’t saved per messenger user-name. If I change the colour on my MSN user-name, someone else who logs in (using my OS X account) gets the same colour.
• Rarely updated, and when it is new features are very /yawn.

These are just a few things off the top of my head. I could add more if I sat and thought about it. In summary, why does the official MSN messenger client for Mac suck so much?

**Note: It handles multiple group conversations very well.

I’ve been reading some [New Scientist](http://www.newscientist.com/) articles online recently, they have some really cool stuff. I’ve often read New Scientist magazine whilst in some form of waiting room (doctor, dentist, etc) but only recently I’ve been thinking about actually subscribing to it.

It contains a lot of really interesting reading but the subscription is something like $200 a year, which I guess is cheap considering the magazine comes out weekly. Still, I’m not 100% certain as yet.

Anyway, on to the topic which I originally started this post for. I went through and subscribed to all the [RSS feeds](http://www.newscientist.com/feeds.ns) I could find on their web-site. Amongst feeds for such topics as ‘Being Human’, ‘Human Evolution’, ‘Mysteries of the Deep’, ‘Quantum World’, I find one specifically titled ‘Teenagers’.

I just found it funny that they had a totally separate category for topics related to teenagers. I guess there is a lot of research being conducted into those strange creatures.

I really like [Adium](http://www.adiumx.com/). Its an awesome multi service chat client and looks a heck of a lot better than many of the ’standard / default’ clients. I have it in my dock and I use it maybe once every few weeks, which really bugs me. The reason I can’t use it as my default client on OS X is because of [this](http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/1583) little bug.

Basically, you cannot have multiple group conversations running in Adium. When i say ‘group conversation’, I’m talking about conversations with more than one person. ‘Multiple group conversations’ means having more than one group conversation. i.e. I want to have a group conversation with contact 1, 3 and 5 but at the same time I also want to be chatting to contact 2, 6 and 4 in another group chat.

Adium doesn’t like this, and ends up sending all messages from both group conversations to the same window. Sure, this may sound fine. I mean you can still see all the messages right? Well yes, but at the same time you don’t really have any idea where the messages you type are going and it’s really confusing.

I would have thought this would be a ‘basic’ feature of any instant message client. If you follow the link to the bug report, you will see that this bug is set to be looked at around version 1.5. Adium is currently in heavy development for a 1.0 release, who knows when the 1.5 release will come around. So in the meantime, I have to make do with the default mac MSN client, which is close to THE worst instant messaging client out there, but that’s a totally other post I need to type up.

I know, I know… Adium is open source, why don’t I get off my lazy butt and help out? Simple answer, I’m too busy trying to get my own apps working. I shouldn’t really complain. Adium (even with its bugs) is an awesome piece of free software and I’d be using it every single day if only it handled multiple group conversations.

I finally got around to watching Wolf Creek ([Official Site](http://www.wolfcreekthemovie.com/), [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Creek_%28film%29), [IMDb](http://imdb.com/title/tt0416315/)) today and it turned out pretty good.

The movie flows pretty well, but there were some sections where I just felt like there was meant to be more but for some reason they cut it out. It seems to end really fast and to be honest I was kind of expecting a bit more. I would have really liked to of seen more with the main male character. He doesn’t seem to do a great deal at all for some reason.

I think watching the ‘making of’ and reading up on all the hype before watching the actual movie affected my opinion as I pretty much knew what was going to happen before it did. Even so, I’m glad I did because in a way it opened my eyes to how low budget the film is and a lot of the thought process behind it.

Still, its a decent Aussie film which was made on a relatively low budget and it turned out decent. I recommend it if you like scary movies.

Melanie is on her way back to America for Christmas. I dropped her off at the Rocky airport at around 6:15am this morning. I’ve got no doubt that her family are really looking forward to seeing her this year. I think it’s been around 3 years since she has been home.

She also gets to visit her aunty Doris and uncle Tim this trip, which is really cool. It was kind of weird that I got to see their place before her when i was over in the US doing my internship. I’m sure she will be excited to see her old car as well.

While she is away I get to eat pizza with sauce on it, and play music and the TV as loud as I want and maybe even have fish and chips with cheese on the chips! Watch out! haha

The annual Rockhampton ‘Fire in the Sky’ was on last night. For those unsure exactly what that is it’s basically a fireworks show down on the river.

They had the usual twilight markets running, although there wasn’t really that many actual markets there. Seems that the Sunday morning markets or heritage markets are a lot more popular for people selling stuff then the twilight ones. Anyway, Melanie and I went with Roland and Bec for a look.

Took us longer to get to the market area amongst the sea of people than it did to actually see all the markets. Never-mind though, Melanie likes browsing markets for bargains.

Whilst there we ran into Blair, Conner and Lee. We all grabbed a few steak burgers, which were really good as expected (what is it with steak burgers you get from shows like that? They are always so good!) then wandered around until we found a suitable piece of cement to stand on for the show. There was no chance of finding a seat.

The actual fireworks were really good. We were lucky enough to be standing in exactly the right spot to get firework bits blown on us from the wind. They weren’t hot or anything, you could just feel little pieces of stuff falling on your face when looking at the show.

After the fireworks ended, we stood around for a little bit hoping most of the crowd would slowly disappear. Walking back to the car was ok, i managed to find a decent park pretty close by which was good.

The actual drive home wasn’t as bad as i thought it would be either. I only got cut off once by some silly lady in a much smaller car.

So yeah, another successful fire in the sky!

*Image shamefully stolen from [Google images](http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=fireworks&btnG=Search+Images).