Yeah, yeah. I’ll post some shit soon. I have a crazy plan to transform Arturia (my Mac mini of much hackery) into a 5-drive file server. I also have a “FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-” story of pain, woe, and hard drive loss in regards to my last bout of hackery.

In any case, can’t talk now but I have more awesome shit coming soon. Stay tuned.

In addition to paying actors to fake buying notebooks, and complain about how Macs are a gazillion times more expensive than cheap, shitty, crapware infested shitboxes like AMD-based notebooks with no battery life and underpowered hardware, they’re now waving this whitepaper around by some guy they paid to write, like it fucking means something. Let me reiterate this for those in the audience that may have trouble dressing themselves in the morning: It’s tantamount to me stating “Hi, I wrote this totally unbiased comparison of the costs of cheap ass PC’s to expensive Macs that’s totally unbiased, fair, and not judgemental in any way, and oh yeah - Microsoft paid me to do it”.

Not to call anyone’s integrity to question, but Roger L. Kay, the author of this whitepaper, is A FUCKING LIAR, and Brandon “I enjoy cocks weekly” LeBlanc is A FUCKING LIAR AND A SHILL. Now that we’ve got that little disclaimer out of the way, lets see how the argument of these worthless faggots fails to hold water like Brandon’s mouth would fail to hold all that sperm he ingests daily.

Lets get to the meat of this argument, shall we? Page 5 states:

Upgrades. One place that Apple really gets people is in the upgrade department. An example is Blu-ray, the newest standard for optical storage. Although it is arguable whether Blu-ray will ever be adopted by mainstream buyers, it does represent the largest optical drive capacity on the market, suitable for several hours of high definition video content. Apple’s solution — a standalone player from Sony, the BDP-S350 — costs $300. A LiteOn DH-401S bought on NewEgg costs $95. That’s $205 for some fancy plastics and fairy dust. But it’s still better, right?

WHAT THE FUCK. No, seriously… what the fuck? Is that an Apple logo on that fucking Blu-ray drive? No? That’s right, it’s a fucking Sony product that happens to cost between $245USD to $432USD. Furthermore, the fucking thing isn’t even ON Apple’s store at the time of writing, so how does this become an Apple-endorsed product? Furthermore, what stops a particularly inventive user to purchase a 5 & 1/4 bay external USB or firewire enclosure and attaching said cheap-ass LiteON drive to said Mac? Fairy dust?

Another example: if someone needs a wireless router and more storage capacity to hold photos, video, and music — not an unreasonable scenario — a 1 terabyte Western Digital USB drive will cost them $150 and an AirPort Extreme Base Station fetches $180 at Apple’s online store, for a total of $330. For $150, the same person can buy a comparable Cisco LinkSys dual-band wireless router. Adding an equivalent 1 terabyte Iomega external drive costs $150 more, for a total of $300 for the same capability. The premium for the Apple setup is $30. Maybe that’s chump change to the cool.

Because we all know that LinkSys routers and Iomega external drives are incompatible with Macs. Furthermore, there’s a world of difference for a user setting up a secure, wireless network if they went with Apple’s Airport solution, in comparison to doing the same thing on the Mac side. Aside from personal experience that I can attest to, there’s also the unscientific study of how many unsecured LINKSYS, NETGEAR and DLINK SSID’s I see when travelling to work and back every day (quite a few), and how many unsecured “Apple Network XXXXXX” networks I’ve come across (none).

We can argue that this is mostly due to market share and all that, but the fact remains that to this day - Apple makes it much easier to set up a secure network, because when you plug the thing in, and point your computer to the Airport base station, all manner of helpful and intuitive wizards pop up and make securing it very unchore-like. If you don’t know shit about computers or wireless security (and lets face it, these people are the majority out there), isn’t $30 a worthwhile investment in making sure you’re doing it right? Furthermore, it’s not just restricted to those “cool” people out there with Macs - even PC users can use it, and take advantage of it. To be kind, I’m not going to mention how the USB port on said base station can allow a person to share said USB drive to multiple people on said wireless basestation, but I guess only “cool” people do that sort of thing.

To their credit, they mention the current bullshit situation involving graphics cards for the Mac Pro. You can usually disregard this, due to the fact that the Mac Pro is a workstation computer, and not your average consumer PC- and that if a guy’s gonna throw out 4 grand AUD on a system, then the $90USD price difference between card vendors is going to mean fuck all to him. To me, it is a particularly painful sticking point that I’m restricted to a particular choice in graphics cards due to the whole EFI issue with the Mac Pros.

But then I remember that the issues I have aren’t necessarily the sort of issues that most Mac Pro owners face. I still enjoy gaming, and that means I prefer nVIDIA due to the quality of their Windows drivers, and the fact that they’ve always supported very fundamental things that ATI simply haven’t wrapped their head around yet - like correct 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratios on a widescreen monitor. For people who use Mac Pros for professional work, this isn’t a hassle. Furthermore, if you buy all the hardware in the one spot, then you only have one place to go in terms of a support channel. Imagine buying a video card from NewEgg, slapping it into your Dell or HP system, and then going to them for help if you run into issues.

Furthermore, the sort of person who’s comfortable swapping out video cards every 6 months is usually not the sort of person who owns a Mac Pro - or if he is, he’s probably got a PC dedicated to gaming somewhere, anyways (which, to rub in Microsoft’s face further, undoubtedly runs Windows XP). People like me are a rare breed in the Mac community.

So, the second argument in the piece is software. Roger Kay goes out and decides to “re-buy” ten tons of shit on the Mac, yet expects software to magically sprout out from Microsoft for free, or that the user going from XP (an eight year old operating system) can expect everything he owns to run trouble free and have no incompatibility issues with Vista. Well, there’s one thing he’s gotta buy every year on the PC - antivirus. While there’s a world of choice out there, lets assume he goes with the usual suspect - Norton AV. That’s $79.99 USD to start off with, because he’s moving from XP to Vista, and probably needs to buy a whole new AV package due to incompatibilities - and then there’s the subscription - $69.99 a year.

Then there’s the accusation that every Mac user has to go out and buy MobileMe, formerly known as .Mac - for no apparent reason other than Apple offer it. What’s the argument here? Because Dear Leader said you should? The fact remains that most Mac users don’t want or need MobileMe, and usually don’t go out and buy it. I happen to have it, but that’s only because I own an iPhone, and find the convenience of automatically updated calendars, contacts, and mail across all my systems and the iPhone a service worth paying for. If not for that, I wouldn’t need it - Gmail and Google Calendars work far better than any Microsoft solution.

Then they’re also forgetting that we actually can run all of our old Windows software on the Mac as well. It can with the cost of XP (or Vista) and using Boot Camp for free - or you can be even smarter about it and pay for VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop and migrate all your old software easily. Hell, both have tools to migrate your old XP PC straight across - and if you bought XP retail, then there’s no need to buy another copy as moving it from one system to another is in the license. That way, you don’t need to rush out and buy everything again - just wait however long you normally would to update software to the latest versions.

So while we’re on the topic of weak excuses, lets move right towards the conclusion with this one:

The mockery of the “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” ads will have faded to a faint echo, as Windows 7 addresses many of the specific jabs highlighted in the ads. So, why, again, was the Mac so much cooler? Oh, the CEO was a better public speaker. And? Uh, the system never crashes. Right, Windows has that, and? The plastics are prettier. Have you seen the XPS One? The Mac boots right up. That right? Shall we benchmark?

Being a beta tester for Windows 7 doesn’t hold the same cred as being a Vista beta tester, now that Microsoft handed the Win7 Beta out to everyone and their dog - but it does allow me to state that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the current release of Windows, and their next release around the corner. Windows 7 is nothing more than a few UI changes, and speedups to Windows Vista. The fact that the version number is 6.1 should clue you in on this. The difference between the two OS’s is the same as Windows 2000 and XP when it came out. The only difference is they’ve had two years of failure with Vista to learn from, and that all the hardware and software vendors have now had time to catch up to make Windows 7 a trouble-free release. This isn’t a new operating system, folks.. it’s Windows Vista Second Edition.

So, with that out of the way - what’s so good about Macs? What is it? Prettier looking boxes? Aluminium? Hypnotic Apple logos? The desire to please Dear Leader? Why don’t you actually go out and ask them? The answer, as it always has been, is MAC OS X. It’s what it’s always been about. It’s why we’re paying more, and gladly doing so. If you’re buying Apple to be “cool”, then you’re as big a fucktard as you would be if you used to write a blog about how awesome Microsoft is, and then got hired by them to do that as your day job.

Now.. the horrible truth of the matter is that I actually use, and enjoy, both products. I had very few issues with Vista when it came out, partially because I was in the beta, and partially because I did my research beforehand, and ensured that the hand-built system I had at the time of Vista’s release was ready for it. I eventually migrated to the 64-bit version in January 2008, and despite a few teething issues - was able to overcome them successfully. Vista wasn’t a failure for me - it actually worked out fairly well, despite me spending most of my time in OS X nowadays.

But what did fail was Microsoft’s marketing. Vista wasn’t perceived well, because the initial hardware it came on was shit, or underpowered. Furthermore, the press blew the fact that corporations weren’t moving to it on day one out of proportion - and forgot that it’s the same fucking thing they did when Windows 2000 and XP came out. Then, there was the announcement of Windows 7 - and with it coming so soon, our company decided “fuck it, we might as well wait until then”. Only now are we implementing Windows 2008 servers, and only in specific instances ($40 a pop for each PC in our company? That’s a lotta cash, considering our company is Australia-wide and enterprise-sized).

On the other hand, Leopard was extremely well-received. I factor a few reasons for it - first of all, it was mostly the same to Tiger in terms of user interface - whereas Vista’s biggest complaint amongst my peers was “Where the fuck did they put xyz now???”. Changing the IP went from a 4-click process that took barely 7 seconds, to a 7-click process that can take up to 20 seconds. Flip 3D was added in response to Mac OS X getting Expose back in 10.3 (2003). However, Microsoft failed to see beyond a fancy 3D task switcher, and take usability lessons from it at the same time. Out of all the “ripped off” features, this is the one I wish Microsoft did properly - I can’t even begin to describe how much I miss Expose at work. That’s the key point between what was nice about Leopard, and what sucked about Vista. In Leopard, the only things that were changed, were done so for the better. In Vista, it felt like they changed things for the sake of change. While people like me would get aggravated by it at first, and adjust - others not so computer-savvy (the great unwashed masses) hated the everloving fuck out of it.

Not to mention, we also forgot to talk about the Microsoft tax. What’s the Microsoft tax, I hear you ask? It’s the tax you pay when something like Conficker gets onto your system and anal rapes it in every which way but Sunday. When you start getting popups warning you of fake viruses, or adverts for Swedish penis enlargment pills coming up all the time. The time taken to remove this shit, or the cost of taking it to Dodgy Bros computer emporium down the road, because HP and Dell tell you to just flatten and reinstall - but you want to keep your precious Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and you’re just not computer savvy enough to back these things up yourself. You’re also afraid, and misinformed, and may think that virus can infect documents and things as well, and that $70-a-year piece of shit virus scanner has done more harm than good, and failed to protect you from the Big Bad Internet, so you get reamed, creamed, and double-teamed by some guy at a mom n’ pop computer store, purely because he knows just that little bit more about computers than you do.

Not that the Brandon LeBlancs and Paul Thurrots of the world will accept this. They’d rather stick their heads in the sand, and continue in the land of make believe where Apple is the same company they were in 1997, Vista is well received by the consumers and press, and Microsoft are still the benevolent demi-gods of past, ruling the PC industry with an iron fist - and that viruses & malware were just this occasional pest of a thing that’d crop up once in a while.

Oh, but I forgot - we’re comparing unfairly here, like how Microsoft like to compare price, but not value. So, to sum up my argument - the head honchos of Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer. One Steve is well known for changing the way we use computers, the other Steve is known for this. Who would you buy a computer from?

Hey Brandon, Steve Ballmer just called and he’s got four words for ya:

ON.
YOUR.
KNEES.
BITCH.

However, money has been somewhat tight for me of late, and I’ve had to make do with no home server to store all my crap, or have the benefit of daily C: backups for all my Windows machines. I had all my media stored locally on my main PC, and backed it up weekly to my trusty Thecus N5200. I read somewhere that it’s possible to hack these things to run a slightly more powerful Linux, when it suddenly struck me - low power, 5 drives, small and portable. Okay, the 600MHz CPU kinda sucks, but damn. It’s almost all I need.

So I did it, and according to my somewhat extensive Google-fu, I think I’m the first person to actually succeed.

So without further ado, I present to you my Thecus N5200 Windows Home Server (in progress):

How the hell did I do it? Well, I did a bit of research into the hardware first. The mainboard and network cards are fairly stock standard Intel stuff, so that’s not a worry - the biggest concern was the custom SATA controller - which is apparently a Marvell MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller. Thankfully, this chip is used on the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8. I’ve included where to get this driver from the list of other hardware components needed.

So, to hack the N5200, you’ll need:

• A DB15 HD PCB (or surface) right angle mount. It looks like this:

  

  With a bit of fiddling - you attach this to the spare spot next to the serial port. Don’t worry about popping the hole out on the backplate, or soldering it in - it won’t quite fit with the case on. You won’t need it after you finish installing it, so just keep it there with electrical tape, or try balance it in a way so it’ll hold steady.

• A USB external DVD drive of some kind. After discovering that I couldn’t get my N5200 to boot from my two USB thumb drives, I had to resort to gutting an old USB IDE drive enclosure, and hooking a DVD-ROM drive up to it.
• A USB thumb drive with the drivers listed below.
• USB keyboard and mouse. Keep in mind that there are only 3 USB ports on the N5200, so you’ll either need a hub of some kind, or go mouseless during the initial part of the install (brush up on your keyboard shortcuts!).
• A 512MB DDR DIMM to replace the crappy 256MB DIMM. If you own the N5200 Pro, Thecus were kind enough to do this for you already.
• The knowledge that this is voiding the hell out of any warranty you’ve got left

Drivers you’ll need:

• The SATA Controller drivers can be found here.

• The Network card drivers can be found here (for the 2-port version)

Drivers missing:

• Video (some kind of Intel onboard thing, supposed to be an 852GM, but won’t install).

• NetChip USB Controller 2282. I assume this is the USB-host port on the back. Can’t find drivers for this.
• I have no idea how to get the LED display to do anything, or respond to button presses. It forever says “Self testing…”

So here’s what you do. First, you need to pull the N5200 apart. There are three screws on the back, which allow you to slide the cover, and remove the backplate. When removing the backplate, watch out for the fan that’s attached to it, and be sure to disconnect it from the SATA backplate.

On the mainboard, you remove the big “Thecus N5200_RJ45″ board that resides above the serial port, by taking out the two screws, and carefully pulling it towards you. You then place the DB15 HD connector onto the board, positioning all those little FUCKING BASTARD pins into the correct holes. I found positioning the back row first, and then using a small flathead screwdriver to help adjust the front row to slide in helped. Be sure not to accidently bend any of the little FUCKING BASTARD pins out of shape. Tape it down with some electrical tape, or try position the VGA cable so it’s not pulling on the DB15 connector too much.

Remove the little 64MB (or 256MB in the case of the Pro) flash drive. Keep it somewhere safe, just in case. If all goes well, we won’t be needing it. While you’re there, be sure to replace the RAM with a 512MB DIMM if you’re stuck with the standard N5200 like me.

Hook up the monitor and watch it boot. To make things easy, just have the one SATA drive in there - whichever drive you want SYS to be on. Hit DEL to get into the BIOS, in order to change the boot volume. Under “Advanced” (second option), go to the boot order. Set the first to USB-CDROM, the second and third to Disabled, and ensure “Allow other devices to boot” or whatever it’s called is ENABLED.

Connect your USB DVD drive, and go through the usual motions of installing Home Server. Be sure to place the SATA drivers at least onto a USB thumb drive, and make sure it’s unextracted (you see INF’s and sys files, not one large ZIP). When Home Server setup complains it can’t find a hard drive, select “Load Drivers”, slap the USB drive in, and continue with setup until finished. Be sure to load the NIC drivers once finished, and verify you can remote into the server via Remote Desktop, before pulling out all the cables and crap, and placing the case back together again. Install the rest of your drives, and away you go.

I’ll have to get back to you all on how it actually performs - the SATA controller and gigabit ethernet should be fairly quick, but the 600MHz CPU in the stock N5200 could hamper performance. The N5200 Pro should alleviate those worries with the 1.5GHz processor, at least. I’ll be sure to report back on how unbearingly slow and painful it is.

This page gave me the idea of using the DB15 VGA connector, and also alerted me as to what kind of drivers I’d need to look for.

This site was also an interesting read, despite being entirely in German.

There might be a way somewhere amongst those two sites to get the front LED to do something.

First, Ballmer fired a warning shot off the bow by stating Macs are too expensive, then their marketing agency went to work with this little gem, about how some woman wants a 17″ notebook for $1,000 USD (that’s about 1.4 grand for us, down under). She winds up with an unnamed “HP Pavillion” for $699 USD, and while the specs aren’t advertised, I expect it’s something along the lines of this.

Nice work, Lauren. You just netted yourself a slower, more power hungry notebook, with - what I’d imagine at that pricepoint - a smaller sized battery to boot. That Best Buy site reports that you’ll get 2 & 1/2 hours of battery life out of that, and because we all know that manufacturers are liars, I’m sure you’d be lucky to see even 1 hour of that. And what’s with the 17″ screen? Okay, she wears glasses so I can see the whole “I’m blind lol” aspect, but my girlfriend has this issue as well, and doesn’t have a problem with her 13″ notebook. Lugging a 17″ sonofabitch around is so patently ridiculous that she should have just went for a desktop, instead. Gee, for just $300 more in her budget, she could have been cool enough to have a not-so-painful keyboard to type on, more portability, and ~3 hours more battery life. Not to mention the added performance of not having a CPU and architecture that sucks.

If times are so hard that you can’t muster up $300USD extra for a notebook, if the extra dosh is such a difficult thing to come by, then what the fuck are you doing buying a notebook in the first place? Do something productive, like tackle your credit card debt or put additional money on your mortgage. Stock up on beans, and get yourself a shotgun for the impending collapse of modern society as we know it. It’s irresponsible fuckers like you that got us in this mess.

So once this rolled around, it was obvious that Microsoft are out to spread yet more FUD. This fellow is named Giampaolo, and he’s after a notebook with portability, battery life, and “power” for $1,500. So naturally, he gets this. A 16″ notebook, that weighs 7 pounds (3.2kgs), and while they don’t list the battery life, I can imagine with the dedicated video card, the 2.4GHz processor, the fingerprint reader, the Altec Lansing Dolby-up-the-arse super duper speakers (with a subwoofer!), and all the other needless shit, that it’s somewhere between 2 hours and fuck all. But that’s all okay, because it’s got a 9600M GT with 512MB of VRAM, and a 500GB hard drive, meaning it’s going to be great at playing games - when sitting at home, connected to AC.

It’s kind of like the end of the third Terminator movie, when Skynet apparently goes out onto the internet on every computer on the earth, and then begins firing nukes at cities and residential areas - where all these computers reside. To paraphrase Yahtzee, they couldn’t have missed the point more if they were facing the opposite direction, and the point was in another country. If the guy wanted something portable to play Far Cry 2 on, he should look into buying a Shuttle PC.

This is not about what these people want - it’s about what they can afford. Microsoft are taking advantage of the fact that every one’s spooked about the current economic shitstorm to spread FUD about their competitors, and the whole thing reeks of Ballmer. They’re taking misinformed, uneducated people off the street, who are only looking for one thing - the thing with the biggest numbers attached to it, for the least amount of money - as opposed to someone who really knows that when looking for a computer, you start with the most fundamental ideal - what do I want this thing to do for me?

So usually, my spiel on any kind of computer recommendations (PC, or Mac) usually starts with this: Who are you, and what do you want to do with it? What kind of history do you have with computers? Are you interested in doing Office work or playing games? Are their any specific software requirements?

That’s how you start hunting for a new system, ladies and gentlemen. Purpose, first. Price, second. Additional wanky features last.

This all changes. I’m intending to be a lot more active in future, and I shall continue to thrust my opinionated self upon those not clever enough to get the fuck outta dodge in the first place.

So.. um.. yeah. More to come.

Yes, yes.. I hate it too how intolerably smug a person often becomes upon becoming acquainted with a significant other (looking at you, Scuzzy), and how frustrating it is when they feel the need to tell the whole goddamn world all about it. So it’s a good thing for me that I loathe my fellow man so very, very much - as I take great delight thrusting my smugness upon you, the reader, by mentioning that my current partner no longer consists of just four digits and a thumb. If you happen to resemble my previous state, then all the better for me. :keke:

Naturally, due to privacy and the sheer idiocy of the fact that I gave her the URL to this site, I really can’t go into much more detail. Suffice to say that, while I’ve been quite content, and somewhat pleased with my life thus far (of the past few years or so), I’m not really sure I’ve been quite this happy. I guess I want to try be a bit more sensible this time around, and not rush into anything so it’s all I’ll really say in regards to that.. but despite my worries and concerns, I feel this is a good thing. I mentioned to a friend earlier, that I saw this potential event coming like a freight train, which carried all sorts of implications and complicated matters - but I was far too stupid to avoid it. On reflection, I’m very glad I didn’t - regardless of where things will take me next.

And finally, to that certain someone reading this. I can’t promise I’ll stop being a worrywart and think of various concerns and worries, etc.. but I can say I’m truly happy things worked out the way they have, and above all - I’m happy being with you. Happier than I’ve been in quite a long time, and I only hope I can make you as happy as you make me.

So now that all that sappyness has left me with a load of excess bile, I’d just like to take this time to mention that the rest of you can go and choke on a bag full of dicks.

Now, you can’t spit in Australia without it landing on someone who has all manner of bad things to say about Telstra, so you’d expect that the best way to compete against them would be to have a company that doesn’t follow Telstra’s guidelines on dealing with customers, and actually provide a good service, be easily contactable, and will bend over backwards to help you with enquiries or issues you may have. Right? Right? Well, unfortunately it appears that Optus are so smitten with the notion of doing everything better than Telstra, that they’ve gone out of their way to not only emulate Telstra’s wonderful customer relation policies, but take them to the next level of ungodly asshole-ness.

So I get my phone and internet service through Optus. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the phone - it’s purely there for the internet service. I arrange to get them transferred to the new place, and with Optus being such absolute pillocks, I prepare myself for the fact that the internet connection may lag behind the phone connection. I’ll be moving on the weekend, so I tell them to disconnect my service on the Saturday. What do they do? The second that 11:59PM, on a Friday night, rolls around - fucking BAM! Phone line and internet service is dead. Okay, so I was hoping that Saturday would mean, like.. that Saturday night, or sometime during Saturday, and not when I’m spending my last few hours playing WOW on the Friday night. So the precision of “Saturday” was most unexpected, but hey.. if they’re that picky about this, then maybe I’ll be fine in regards to the phone and internet getting hooked up. Right?

Sure enough.. the Tuesday I specified as the date to get it put on rolls around, and they connect the phone line up. I’m a little alarmed, because my DSL modem reports that there’s no DSL synchronization whatsoever, but hey.. maybe that comes later. A week rolls past, and I’m wondering what’s taking Optus so long with my internet connection. I ring them to find out. A few hours later, I get on to somebody, give the pertinent information, and they draw a blank. They can’t find any records, or they do find records stating I disconnected my service back in some arbitary month, last year. Kind of odd, seeing as I was using and paying for it still, just a bit over a week ago. To cut a long story short, they seemed to completely lose all record of me ever wanting to transfer my internet service, and probably did so because I was so insistant that I’d keep my original bandwidth limits, and not this bullshit “10GB flat with uploads included” plan they were going to slap me on.

Fair enough. Maybe this is a good opportunity to go with those awesome plans TPG have at their disposal. I inform Optus very politely that they can go fuck themselves, and immediately get in contact with TPG. TPG tell me they’ll have me connected within the week. Sure enough, a week later - I get an e-mail whilst at work, stating the work on the line has been done, and when I get home, I’ll have lovely, lovely internets at ADSL2 speeds, and with TPG’s significantly higher bandwidth limits (100GB a month, and only shaping down to 256k when I go over).

Thing is, when I get home - not only is there no internet, there’s no more goddamn phoneline. In fact, when I try calling my number - some guy named Tom picks up the line, and tells me his phone number is nothing like mine. Awesome. I wait until the next day to promptly call TPG, and inform them of what went down. They play the “Oh, it’s a problem with your phone line, call your line provider” game, obviously not wanting to own up to the fact that whoever “connected” the line obviously had a case of the passion fingers. Fuck it, then.. I’ll give Optus a call. An hour of waiting on the phone with Optus later, and I get on to somebody. They then inform me that

1. I have to wait a week or two.
2. That I will most likely have to pay for the tech to come out.

Naturally, this has me seething with rage. After this, I make two more calls. The first, is to the TIO with a complaint against Optus’s behaviour, and a statement that I want them to fix it by today or the next business day, and to not charge me a contract cancellation fee when I change providers, as they have routinely failed to provide me service, or actually do what I request of them (the internet transfer, for example). The next call is to Telstra, to get my phone line ported back to them. This all happened on Friday of last week.

Monday afternoon, as I’m coming home - I get a call. There’s going to be a Telstra technician waiting for me when I get home to re-install my phone line and internet service. So, there’s something to be learned in all of this. When your ISP or telco try to pull some kind of bullshit on you, demand proper service from them. When they come up with a bullshit excuse as to why they won’t, take it to the TIO. Be sure to post all about it on places like Whirlpool, as well or do your best to make your ordeal as public as possible (ie, this blog post). Morale of the story is that when your ISP or telco hands you a pile of shit - you don’t have to take it.

However, seeing as I’m actually gainfully employed now, as opposed to being a student slash jobless dole bludging bum when I played the two forementioned muhmorpegers, you’d think my grind quota would be taken up by doing the same boring crap, day in day out at the company who’s name shall not be named to protect the innocent (i.e., me - from being fired). However, WOW isn’t so much grind.. it’s kind of like playing an older style of RPG, like.. y’know.. Neverwinter Nights or something, only with a fuckton more people playing with you, and without the boring statistical bullshit that would give dice wielding nerds raging erections. You don’t have to worry about which stats do what, and for what class or whatever - WOW does a good job of allowing you to not worry about that sort of shit.

That’s not to say it’s not dumbed down for ‘tards like me, if you have a hard on for Excel spreadsheets then WOW can suit those needs as well. But the important thing for me, is I don’t feel the game penalises me for not caring about what stats go where, or any crap like that. I just continue to get experience for killing the local populace of monsters for stationary lazy-ass dickwad NPC’s. Being a rogue, all I need to worry about is things that affect my stamina and agility, putting points in the talents that interest me, and if I poke things in the butt, it really fucking hurts them.

The point I’m trying to make is that WOW is fun for me. I guess it’s also because I’m currently playing and levelling with a friend that keeps it interesting. Not sure how long it’ll last, but the whole running-around-the-countryside and killing-x-amount-of-crap-for-some-lazy-dickhead is still fun for me, and this is no doubt simply due to my inexperience with the game, and once I’m more familiar with everything in it, I’m sure I’ll be as jaded as the rest of you.

Astute visitors may have noticed that I updated the hardware page a couple of weeks ago, with the purchase of 8GB of RAM for my beloved-yet-sometimes-temperamental Mac Pro. No, that’s not sticks of RAM to bring her up from the default 2GB to 8GB.. that’s 4 sticks of 2GB DIMMs, with the original 1GB DIMM pair slapped aside into a box, awaiting the day I pull my finger out and sell it to someone needy.

Interesting thing of note, was that when I purchased the crap - 800MHz FBDIMMs were impossible to get in this country, so I went to Other World Computing and bought it there. I even threw in the most expensive shipping offered, in order to get it in roughly a week after placing my order. Sure enough, it arrived fairly quickly and without incident - costing me a whopping $600 odd AUD.

Today, I found that ePowerMac, an Australian Mac vendor, are now selling 800MHz FBDIMMs via their website. How do they compare? Well, see for yourself. $900 odd for 4×2GB sticks (I think, their site is a tad confusing in that regard), or a whopping great $1,600 odd for two 4GB sticks. Jesus. However, ePowerMac aren’t the only ones to do this. Just two 2GB 667MHz FBDIMM sticks for the previous Mac Pro models from MacOnline will set you back just shy of $600, and that’s for a grand total of 4GB. Almost what I paid for 8GB from the states… with postage.

But, this isn’t just shops suited for Apple products that are getting in on this. Even my old time favourite PC component store, AusPCMarket, has the price way up the bum. You can do some more price comparisons on Shopbot, with Abit being “a bit more like it”, neglecting the fact that it’s for 667MHz stuff with heatsink spreaders not suitably designed for the Mac Pro’s unique cooling needs. Futhermore, they advertise their stock availability as “Ask”, which often translates to “Months” or “When Hell freezes over” in computer shop lingo, whichever occurs first.

So, that’s the state of RAM here - at least for FBDIMMs, anyways. Maybe there’s some kind of anal importing tax, or there’s some financial reason that I can’t understand which causes it to cost so fucking much, or just maybe they have shitty suppliers who are bending them over a barrel and assraping them - but I fail to see why buying it overseas, and getting the most expensive shipping one can, still works out to be half the goddamn price than what people are trying to pass it off for over here.

Feel free to add your own thoughts to this goddamn shitheap.

Well, it’s been a long time coming because every time I tried to upload forum code onto the site, Transmit would bomb the fuck out and die somewhere in the middle of some horrendous directory tree, making resuming the transfer next to impossible. That, and every time I ran into this issue, I’d yell at the top of my lungs, delete everything, and walk away for another day/week/month/whatever.

So, everything’s now up there. I’m getting ready to recreate things under a similar vein to the beloved AusAnime of yore. It’s pretty much blank right now, so for the love of God, please visit, sign up, and start posting goddamnit. I’ve also put up some rules to abide by, and an awesome starting collection of avatars, some of which you’ll recognise as being picked randomly in the blog comments for those who haven’t signed up with gravatar.

In any case, check it out and let me know what you think.