I finally got around to replacing my home fixed line phone with VOIP. I took the easy route of sticking with my ISP, Netspace/iiNet. Previously each month I’d been paying $59.95 for ADSL2+ broadband, plus for the home phone $22.95 rental, plus $6 for caller ID, plus $2.93 for an unlisted number. Local calls were ... [More]
I don’t normally see much spam thanks to the spam filters, but I did see this funny one a few days ago: IMF APPROVED PAYMENT LETTER. GOOD DAY TO YOU, It is a great pleasure to contact you this day as i have just been appointed the new Chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ... [More]
Disaster! No internet at home. Yesterday iiNet/Netspace had major outage in Victoria. It was eventually fixed, but even after a modem reboot we couldn’t get back online. Then I noticed the home phone (yes, I still have one of those) was getting no dial tone. My assumption initially was that this was just an unhappy ... [More]
In the 90s, phone numbers were going to run out if we didn’t take the plunge and switch from nine digit 0x-xxx-xxxx numbers to ten digit 0x-xxxx-xxxx numbers. The telecommunications industry (led by… was it Austel?) got everybody switched over okay. (In the US, they decided not to expand the number of digits for local ... [More]
The other day I retired one of my oldest web pages, an FAQ on Melbourne public transport. It started life (I think around 1993, before the Web was around) as a Usenet FAQ for the misc.transport.urban-transit group. In 1994 it was posted (with an incomplete attempt to convert it to HTML) on Railpage — where ... [More]
Pondering the fact that I’d browsed both dstore.com.au and estore.com.au, I was curious as to what others exist… astore.com.au — watches and jewellery bstore.com.au — Birkenstock shoes cstore.com.au — forwards to Codagenic, selling an ecommerce platform dstore.com.au — all sorts of stuff; been around for years estore.com.au — geeky stuff; a division of City Software ... [More]
Trivia for you: Back in prehistoric times, when most of you had never heard of the Internet and barely anybody used the Web, and way before Twitter and Facebook, I blogged the 1996 Federal election campaign. Several times a week I’d add something new, including a spoof leader debate transcript, a Hippy Party manifesto, Ron ... [More]
The curse of the Internet and the short attention span — there’s too much stuff to look at. So I check my email. Then I have a look in Google Reader. What’s Twitter doing? Okay. Facebook? My turn in Scrabble yet? Might check a couple of the news sites and see what’s happening. And the ... [More]
Google has announced (somewhat early, and amongst other things) the top Australian searches of 2009. Most popular searches of 2009 Facebook YouTube Hotmail eBay MySpace Google Yahoo Gmail Bebo Seek So plenty of people search for Google in Google, despite the idiocy in doing so, and more significantly, the inherent dangers: