People often say that the years go faster as you get older and I can definately attest to that fact. It seems like only yesterday we were celebrating Christmas, and yet here we are counting down toward the end of the year again. I’ts been a while since my last post due to everything being pretty hectic (when isn’t it though). On the good news front I have finished uni exams which means I am on “holidays”, these “holidays” however have been generously filled by Safeway with more shifts.

One thing that is looming on the technology front is the release of the new 3G iPhone. For those of you who know me well, you will also now that I was very critical of the original iPhone (I mean seriously what company launches a ’state of the art’ phone that is only 2G?), however now that the 3G iPhone is on the horizon I must say I want one. The reasons are simple, I prefer ease of use and practicality over stupid features that your never going to use (eg. Video Calling which I have done once in the past 2 years). During my limited time off from work today I went into a T-Life store (Telstra’s version of an Apple Store) and had a play round with the new release phones including some of the touch screen models. I must say after playing around with them, nothing compares with the ease of use that the iPhone has.

So like many other people who are into technology I am eagerly awaiting the release of pricing from the mobile carriers (I was pretty impressed with Telstra’s to be honest).

Today was one of those really frustrating days. It started with Lawson asking about team photos for aerobics and football umpiring and ended with leaving with an approval form from Scotty for the photos of the students to be put in the year 12 magazine. This one form has given me more grief than you possibly could imagine and I practically lived in Scott’s office all day today (broken up by my frequent trips to IT, which is inconveniently located at the other end of Senior School). Although one humurous moment was Luke “bursting into a fit of giggles” in math due to Ange’s book and me doing that excited voice thing when people walked past the window (Pant happened to walk past the window), anyway Luke almost got himself kicked out of math which was pretty funny. Also I just got off a 15 odd minute conversation on the phone with Nic in Singapore and it only cost me 30c thanks to MyNetFone, as opposed to my usual mobile charges of about $12 or the Telstra landline charges of about $15 and your soul.

It never surprises me how much paperwork is required to get things done at our school. Basically to get this Year 12 magazine done, I’m going to require around 400 pieces of paperwork, from 4 precincts, and in over 5 departments. Why do you ask? well simply because it seems we need everyones approval before we even put pen to paper.

I’ve finished sending most of the emails I needed to and have now decided to update my blog in order to get rid of those pesky people that follow me around asking me to update my blog, Well anyway on Saturday night apparently the whole Optus mobile network went down in inner Melbourne, which explained the unusual “can I borrow your phone” requests from strangers. But that was back up early Sunday morning, and no doubt many people’s Saturday night plans had gone astray due to the outage. I have gotten even more frustrated with Telstra, and spent most of today figuring out exactly how we are going to pay for everything we want. Anyway I have nothing else to report, except for the fact that channel Ten have taken like an hour and a half of TV away from me and replaced it with this stupid show full of idiots in a house. Well at least I have my Lateshow with Letterman, oh wait…no I don’t cause they moved that to an hour in order to make room for bimbo’s in a house.

Today was an extremely busy day, as I needed to see some people about work which was pretty boring and overall pointless (at least I get paid ). I then spent about 30 minutes on hold for Telstra’s business support to fix up a billing issue, they tried to blame me and it was only when I challenged this they admitted that it was their fault. After my Telstra dose I headed down to school to offer my moral support to all the technical crew (I didn’t actually do anything technical related), but I managed to speak to Ms. Hill which was good. After “helping” at school I then headed into JB Hi-Fi to pick up a MiniSD card for my phone, I managed to get a 1Gb Sandisk for $29 (got it reduced from $33 ). After reveling in my awesome bargaining power and the $4 I saved I then made my way to Caulfield and had lunch (at 3:30pm). I then spent the rest of the afternoon getting prices for the Nokia N95 (for my boss), anyway it will cost a small fortune (about $1250) but that’s the phone he wants so that’s the phone he will get (he reminds me of a certain principal I know ). I’m now sitting down watching the football (Collingwood Vs Richmond), I was going to go but decided that I really can’t be bothered.

Also another note to a certain Connex cynic who shall remain nameless (his blog can be found at http://www.jamesx.net), I caught 5 trains today, and they were all on time (one was 2 minutes late to be accurate). The buses however were a different story (both of them more than 10 minutes late).

Also this is post #98

Telstra launched its ADSL 2 service today without much publicity, for those of you on ADSL 1 plans (256kb-1500kb) with Telstra you will be able to either upgrade your plan for the same price each month as your current plans, or change you plan to the cheaper version of your current plan hence saving you money. For those of you that aren’t with Telstra, you will have to wait to reap the benefits of this shakeup.

Well three exciting things have happened this week, one, Telstra launched its ‘NextG‘ network which is pretty much 3G that runs on a lower frequency than 2100Mhz that Optus, 3 and Vodafone use. Telstra also launched the “hiptop” service here in Australia. For those of you whom have no experience with these little devices they are similar to blackberry’s, PDA’s etc however they are much simpler to use and focus more on entertainment, web surfing, chat, so they are pretty much fun blackberry’s, anyway some people at work use them to keep in touch with friends, colleagues etc around the world. Now the amazing thing about this service is that Telstra are actually extremely well priced, its $30 for unlimited data/usage in a month, anyway I won’t be getting one simply because I hate Telstra. Visit Telstra’s HipTop website for more info

On a similar topic, I’m now with Optus again as Vodafone amazingly managed to piss me off more than what Optus used to. As much as I didn’t want to go back to Optus, there were simply no other choices that suited me, anyway I have kept my Vodafone number which was a pain in the ass to port across (ask Luke, I seemed to have real issues with the recording asking me my phone number), well everything is done now and I’m now a ‘happy’ customer with Optus.