Chris's Random Ramblings

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 - Buying Online

Bought a copy of Half Life 2 over the internet using Steam. At US$50, its about AUS$20 cheaper than buying it from the local store, and much more convenient. I'm using iTunes now to buy my music, so I can also avoid the hassle of going to music stores. If only Amazon.com had an Australian store (or there was a decent electronic book device).

Half Life 2 is a pretty amazing game. The graphics engine is more impressive than the Doom 3 one, the story line is enticing and it runs much better on my machine. I think this game is going to suck up quite a bit of my time.

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Mon, 20 Sep 2004 - Firefox fun Between a slight cold, hayfever (at least its getting warmer!) and having a little too much fun at Mikey and Jo's engagement party on Saturday night, it wasn't a particularly productive day at work. But Anton did manage to get a few of us rather addicted to trying out new Firefox extensions. So I now have about 10 extensions installed, turning my lightweight browser into something quite heavy again. I'm sure they will all greatly increase my productivity.

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Mon, 20 Sep 2004 - Buggy Locks Whilst following the story about the bug in Kryptonite (and many other U-shaped) bike locks, I discovered that TSA approved baggage locks are also rather easy to open. Not that it is of a particular worry to me anymore as the lock disappeared on the trip home from Ireland to Australia. It appears they got so excited with the bolt cutters they even cut the loop on the zipper so the bag can never be locked again. I guess thats one way to discourage people from locking their luggage.

I dropped my bike off to get it serviced, as well as replace the mountain bike tires with slicks. The guy at the store hadn't heard about the problems with the Kryptonite locks and I left a printout of the article with him. I had a bit of a browse through the bike locks they do sell - nearly all of them are Kryptonite, and the others have very similar locks so are problably also vulnerable.

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Fri, 20 Aug 2004 - Emacs command of the day M-x make-frame-on-display - very handy for putting an emacs onto other servers (such as a vnc server), without having to start a fresh emacs.

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Tue, 20 Jul 2004 - AmericaLand Back off to AmericaLand and Canadia again. I must have had the work experience student when checking in Monday morning in Canberra. It took him forever to get me my boarding passes and he made some off-hand joke about whether the flight would make it over the pacific. It didn't worry me, but I'm sure they're not meant to say those sorts of things. And he forgot to put all the tags on my bag so someone had to chase them for a bit on the belt.

The security lanes were insanely long in LA - luckily we had a couple of hours to transfer between international and domestic. They were checking passports against boarding passes, but I wonder how much of it is just for show, as the woman didn't even bother looking at me when checking mine, so the photo was pretty much superfluous.

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Thu, 20 May 2004 - Cusco Up at 3am to get ready for a 4am pickup for a 6am flight. Unfortunately was stuck at the airport due to bad weather. Given how bad the fog seems to be, and apparently its like this for the whole summer, its amazing anything gets in or out.

Am slowly picking up bits of Spanish and can now read bits and pieces. The flight finally left at about 9am as the weather in Cusco cleared. I was expecting a 3 hour flight as that was what the itinerary stated but it turned out to be only 1 hour long. So after all the waiting around I was only an hour later than I expected.

After dropping my stuff at the hotel I went out for wander around to the Plaza de Arms. The roads around this area are cobblestone and the streets are very narrow. The atmosphere from the 16th century architecture is fabulous. The Plaza de Arms has a couple of churches, lots of people trying to sell you everything from postcards to trip to Maccu Piccu, and a whole bunch of restaurants.

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Tue, 20 Jan 2004 - Holidaying at home Going back to Adelaide for the Christmas and New Year holidays is kind of like taking a holiday from being an adult. Food magically appears for dinner, and clothes are mysteriously returned washed and ironed. Rather nice to have for a while.

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