Dan Makovec’s blog

New HDD

It’s like having a whole new computer! My new 80GB drive arrived on Thursday morning (7.15am - not bad) and I set to work straight away on swapping it into the Vaio. The only hitch I had was with the XP serial number. I left my number back in Oz and a bunch of ones I got given didn’t work before I finally hit the jackpot.

I’d spent the past few nights backing up my photos and documents onto CD (”What? You don’t have a DVD burner? What century do you live in?!” asked my boss when I told him how many CDs I needed) and had preconfigured Brian’s and my Ipods to run in Disk mode for music restore, so I was ready for the swap.

I had my handy dandy driver CD that I’d made back in 2001. The CDs that came with the laptop were useless since I’d bought it in Tokyo and all the software was in Japanese, so when I got back to Adelaide I’d scoured the web for English equivalent Sony drivers and organised them nicely for easy install. This came in useful - the complete install time for XP, all the drivers, the latest Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and all my files was just under 4 hours, including the low level drive format that the XP setup did (which took about 45 mins).

As expected, Itunes proved to be the biggest bitch. I upgraded to 4.5, and earlier in the week had flashed the Ipods with the latest OS’s (1.4 and 2.2) so they’d be ready for it. After plugging my Ipod in I sucked all the songs off of it by just doing a file copy before installing Itunes in order to avoid a repeat of the library synch disaster that wiped out my collection last time. Then I installed Itunes and tried to import the songs, only to find that yet again it repeatedly crashed upon trying to import some of the m4a’s (the mp3’s worked fine though).

I figured out that all the m4a’s that were killing it were ones I’d made during ripping on Dad’s computer back in Oz. I remembered that the machine had locked up a few times during the ripping process, and it looked like during the lockups it had corrupted some of the files. Upon importing over here, Itunes just didn’t know what to do with them and crapped itself. So I manually went through about 1500 tracks, weeding out the ones that were crashing it. Eventually they all got sucked in, leaving only small holes in my imported collection (I lost the Evita Soundtrack for one thing *sob*). Still the good news is that I now have more space for songs. While before I had about 3000 songs in the collection, many were duplicates and some were bad recordings or just plain corrupt. Now there’s about 2100 good, non-dupe songs all with decent tags.

Oddly enough, the computer does treat the Ipods differently. While my 2nd generation (buttons around the scrollwheel) Ipod syncs quickly, Brian’s 3rd gen (round buttons at the top) machine takes a while to be recognised by the laptop, sometimes up to a minute. Looks like there’s still something dodgey in Apple’s comms software.

Still, with a fresh OS install and new HDD, the laptop’s a lot zippier than it used to be. It’s also nice that even with the song collection and all my photos I’ve still got nearly 60GB free, which is twice the size of my entire old drive.

The main problem I’m having is with Thunderbird’s Addressbook importer. I store my addresses on my Yahoo account and it provides an export function, but Thunderbird makes a real mess of sucking them in, regardless of what format is used. Hopefully they’ll fix this in the next release. It’s not a major problem though, since I keep my mail in my IMAP account and can usually find the person I’m looking for from old mails.

I’m still considering looking at a Powerbook in the long term. With this HDD upgrade though I think old faithful here will keep me happy until the G5’s come out next year. I’ve seen my colleagues frustrations with Apple software quality control. The OS upgrades they did this week were a joke, causing no end of frustration in the form of powerbooks that no longer booted. There’s no excuse for that from a company that has complete control over the hardware that its OS is run on. Also, my less than ideal Itunes experience (the UI’s still by far the best, it’s reliability is just questionable when doing something other than plain old music playback) leads me to think I might just hold on a little bit longer until Apple get their software QA program working properly before I make the leap from a system that basically works fine.

What’s up with TV?

Graz made a posting to our mailing list lamenting the lack of quality in TV at the moment, which started me thinking about what it is that’s killed off the fun of TV.

Two words describe the downfall of television as an entertainment product: Reality TV

It’s killed off originality and thought process as TV executives spend no more than 3 hours a week dreaming up premises for new programs that all without exception feature either:

a) former and/or b-grade celebrities being humiliated
or
b) an attempt to get unknown everyday people to have sex on camera

The teeny bopper market love it since they love seeng icons being belittled (it’s a teen thing, we’ve all been through it), and love the titilating thought of seeing someone else’s naughty bits on screen. So, the advertising revenue for hip youth-oriented products pours in.

Add the fact that it’s cheap to produce since all you need is a bunch of cameras (cheap surveillance and handycam types, not expensive studio ones) and editing equipment that can be reused from old shows, a hack editor or two and a deep-throated voiceover artist to try to convince the audience that there’s a point to the CCTV-quality footage that’s on the screen in front of them.

Not that I mind this to be honest. The lack of quality TV programming means that I get my butt out from in front of the TV and find some more interactive entertainment rather than just being sat glued to the goggle box. Public TV for me has now become no more than an information medium in the form of news and current affairs programs with a bit of background entertainment in the form of music videos for while I’m cooking or cleaning. I’d actually say that the downfall of TV programming has led to an improved quality of life for me!

Then again, maybe TV hasn’t gotten any worse. Maybe it’s just different, and as we’ve gotten older, that different style simply no longer appeals to us. Maybe mainstream TV programming is just always aimed at the 10-24yo market, and my friends and I are now just out of that age bracket.

I wonder what anybody else’s thoughts are on the matter

Mobile phones

After seeing ’s entry mentioning he’d like a mobile phone, I got thinking about what it is that makes a good phone. Given that Brian’s and my mobiles are both just about at the end of their natural battery life (and *gasp* still posessing monochrome screens!), the topic of getting new phones has come up in our household recently.

So what do we want in a phone? For me it’s simple: long battery life (1+ week that doesn’t decrease too quickly once you start *using* it), easy to use address book and text, good reception and good voice quality.

Most people seem to get fairly attached to SMS messaging - so a decent keyboard that isn’t too fiddly seems to be a must.

MMS seems to be a bit of a flop though - I can’t imagine people really making use of it for quite some time, especially given its current cost. Do we *really* need to send photos to each other on the spot?

Video phones are a nice idea and the companies over here are really pushing them (we had a great time mucking around with them when I worked in Tokyo back in ‘01 - but then we weren’t paying to use them!). Nobody here seems to want the invasion of anonymity they represent in everyday life though.

Also, the backbone powering the 3G phone network just isn’t good enough for everyday use. I have a sophisticated yardstick for measuring this - Mykro. If the video quality is good enough so that he can lip-read over the phone screen, then it’s ok.

During my recent trip to Adelaide, we ran an impromptu test with Greg and Vanessa’s “3″ Video phones, where I went outside and Myk sat inside. After a few minutes, we gave up - he was only able to pick up on heavy vowels (”f*****ck”, etc) and had to fill in the consonants himself, as the pixelation of the mouth was too great to be usable. Maybe next-gen will be good enough - although I’m sure we’ll look a sight sitting on the buses talking to each other slowly enough to be comprehensible to the average lip-reader on a 1 inch screen
So what phone to get next? Not sure. I’ve never been impressed with Nokia’s reception or voice quality. I’ve had 3 Nokias, a Motorola and a Philips Jazz. I’d place Nokia at the bottom in terms of both of those categories, and the Motorola at the top, followed by the Jazz.

Moto’s main drawback was its crap battery life and SMS system (I believe ITap has improved a lot - although Nokia’s usually seems better to me). Moto’s UI was also terribly unfriendly, as I was reminded in March when I tried to teach Deb how to use my old phone wth her new SIM. I understand now that their UI has improved somewhat now as well though.

I’ve heard good things about Panasonic phones, and I like the look of the Sony Ericssons. I originally wanted a P900 but gave up because it’s just too chunky and expensive. A slimmer version would probably satisfy me. Then again, I’ve always wanted a nice clam-shell phone, which everybody except Nokia makes. I’ll have to take a look around

Troy - I wonder if it’s any good

The reviews for Troy have been pretty flat so far. It comes out here this week, and with Brian so hooked on Orlando Bloom I’m sure we’ll be there to see it pretty quickly.

From what I’ve read so far, I can take the following into the movie:

- The musical score is crap. Apparently the original score was worked on for a year, then the composer got sacked. So they brought in James Horner of Titanic fame to knock a new one up in a couple of months.

- Brad Pitt, while cute, is no heroic action movie star in the realm of Russell Crowe (who admittedly is not cute, and decidely brutish in everyday life)

- The film is being promoted, over here at least, as a good (Achilles/Pitt) vs evil (Paris/Bloom) event. In actual fact, Paris apparently does bugger all but muck around with his chick Helen while big brother Hector goes out to take on Achilles, who’s only fighting for the glory any way and doesn’t really care about the outcome.

- In the big battle scenes, the CGI is apparently really obvious

- The actress (some new oz girl I’ve never heard of) who plays Achille’s girl gave an interview where she said the movie was chaotic and nobody knew what was going on. I wonder if the plot will work out the same?

- Paris doesn’t die in the end.. Huh? Didn’t the guys who wrote this ever read Homer? I wonder if Achilles ever gets struck in the foot.

- Apparently Eric Bana is very good. I’m glad to hear that! While I still have trouble reconciling the Eric of today (this movie, Hulk, Blackhawk Down and Chopper) with the scrawny little Melbournian who used to host his own chat show and do sketch comedy, he’s turned out to be an amazingly versatile actor. Let’s hope he gets his dues for this. For B’s benefit, apparently Orlando is good, albeit in a wimpy, loverboy sort of way (as opposed to the other brutes who muscle their way around).

OK, I think I’m prepped. I’m not expecting much but maybe I can be pleasently surprised. Hollywood’s got a tradition of pumping out an epic a year, and this year’s bringing a bumper crop of them. Let’s just hope the quality is up to scratch.

The trip that was

OK, back in London now. I’ve been running around quite a bit, so haven’t had any time at all to post!

I never made it to Andrea’s. She insisted in doing all her chores herself, so instead I headed on over to Graz in the house where the two of them are to live (once she’s done her tour of duty in the US).

The house was a bit of a mess, thanks to Graz having only just moved in 2 days before. We spent Saturday afternoon cleaning the place up, throwing his old computer gear (I’m talking Amiga and C64 here) in the shed outside since he was so reluctant to part with it, and removing the stack of boxes cluttering up the living room.

Sunday was the wedding, and I spent the morning with Graz helping him get ready - he made a remarkably calm groom I must admit! The wedding went fine from the spectators point of view, although as best man I have to admit to being completely out of breath and knackered by the end of the night - lots of behind the scenes running around to do. It was a great ceremony though, and the reception in Camelot Castle was spectacular. My speech, partly written and partly ad libbed, went down well, although one of Andrea’s aunties later eclipsed my attempts with some very sharp humour which had everyone in stitches afterwards. Jose ended up driving me home at 1am - neither of us having touched a drop of alcohol all night apart from the bubbly for the speeches.

The rest of the week was spent catching up with friends and family over lunches and dinners pretty much non-stop - so much so that it’s all a bit of a blur now! I did take a day out for myself on the Thursday to spend some time down the beach on Adelaide’s last warm day of the year (a lovely sunny 30 degrees) before the season changed to Autumn overnight. Things were made a lot easier when I hired a car for the week so I could get around without needing people to take me places.

Our weekend camp never eventuated, with Saturday turning into a day of driving around. Sunday however, I went with Adrian, Bron, Felicia and Myk to Kuitpo Forest (scene of our second fest) for a picnic lunch and aerobee throwing, then Victor Harbour for some mini-golf, penguin watching and stargazing. Monday became a barbecue at Greg and Vanessa’s where everybody showered me with CDs and DVDs full of MP3 music. I’ve now got more stuff than I had before the great ITunes disaster - thanks guys!

Monday night I finally got to have dinner out with my sister in China town, then Tuesday I spent on my own doing errands like clearing up old tax issues, affecting final mail redirection and cancellation with all the companies that were still mailing me at my old address. That afternoon I went into town to try to pick up some Summer clothes and DVDs for people back in the UK, and failed miserably on all counts - the DVDs hadn’t been released yet, and the Summer sales had all finished leaving only winter stock in the shops. I did however manage to do a last minute good deal on a couple of Canon Ixus 400 digital cameras (one each for Brian and myself), picking them up for $550AUD each.

After meeting up with old uni buddies Haggis and Jamz for drinks in town that evening, I sped back home to dinner with Dad before packing my stuff for the flight the next morning.

Singapore was a write-off. I landed at 7pm and didn’t reach the hotel until about 8.30, by which time I was just too tired to move, especially given the monsoonal rains that were coming down outside. I chose instead to partake in the delicious hotel buffet then retire to the comfort of my room for a long, tepid bath (Singaporeans haven’t heard of hot water) and a decent night’s sleep before getting picked up at 9.30am to get to the airport.

The flight back sucked. The plane was really tightly packed (NO free seats), the turbulence was the heaviest I’ve experienced, and the screaming babies kept everyone awake the whole time. Here’s a tip: if your flight is long distance, fly at NIGHT. At least your body can switch into a half decent sleep mode that way. We left Singapore at 1pm, and flew for 13 hours of full solid daylight only to arrive at 6.30pm in London. The dopey cabin crew didnt’ even bother to ask people to pull down their shades to at least PRETEND it was night time. As a result, I was feeling pretty awful by the time I met Brian at arrivals.

As for what happened next - that’s a whole other story…