It’s April and I’m still waiting for my free Vista upgrade from Acer, sent the proof off two months ago, nothing back, rung, they told me to send an email, sent email, no response. Has Acer in Australia run a scam here? time to call DOCEP or the ACCC maybe? Hopefully someone from Acer in Australia scans blog posts and can fix this.

UPDATE Just received a call directly from Acer Australia (1pm AWST), less that 4 hours after the post. Highly apologetic and CD is on its way…they are also going to investigate the whys on the matter as well, apparently the offer was being provisioned by a 3rd party, and yet they apologised none the less and took full responsibility. Brilliant Customer Service and a refreshing attitude for a company operating in Australia. As I said to the chap, love the laptop but bought it when I did because of the Vista offer otherwise I would have held off. Hopefully Vista will be here shortly, but kudos again to Acer for the call.

Nearly 12 months ago we took possession of our new house, and I spent 2 weeks of literally back breaking work laying the floor in the new house, timber laminate was all that we could afford at the time, mind you, it was still $6500 just for the laminate. About 3 months later the floor started to lift, at random places the floor buckled and occasionally broke. We later found out that slabs on a new house (in Australia houses are usually built on a concrete slab) take 12-18 months to “dry out” and that essentially moisture from the slab had caused the problem, and there was not a thing we could do to fix it, bar rip the floor up and start again. Today marks the start of Operation Floor Lift, where I’ve got 1 week to lift 220 sq m of timber laminate and dumb it into a miniskip prior to the new floor being laid next week, and we’ll be out of the house for at least 2 weeks as well after that: the new floor consists of proper timber: local BlackButt (Eucalyptus patens) which is costing an arm and a leg and takes 2 weeks to lay and finish off. I’ll be working from the laptop starting Saturday presuming the floor lifting doesn’t kill me in the mean time, laying at nearly did. Moral of the story: seal your slab prior to laying flooring. Now if only someone had told me that 12 months ago 🙂

About time…give or take a couple of months 🙂

By way of introduction we regularly travel to Perth, say every 2-3 months, usually to catch a show or do some shopping and on every trip we usually try a new hotel, after all it makes the 2 hour drive a bit more of an experience when we get there. I don’t think I’ve ever written a hotel review here before at duncanriley.com despite having stayed in probably a dozen or more different hotels over the last 3 or 4 years in Perth, some were good, some were ordinary, but this trip gave cause for comment because unfortunately my generally observed rule for hotels: you get what you pay for, didn’t hold true.

The Holiday Inn Perth didn’t come super cheaply, although in this day and age one could well argue that $170 (AUD) per night including breakfast is a reasonable cost, you can certainly book other 4 star hotels in Perth for less on corporate or last minute rates. I’ve never stayed at a Holiday Inn before but through word of mouth I was always led to believe that Holiday Inns were a solid American Hotel experience, clean, very high standard…indeed at the top end of the 4 star ratings experience.

Suffice to say the word of mouth was incorrect.

Clean is not a word I’d apply to the Holiday Inn Perth. Sure, the room had obviously been cleaned…lightly, but the grime in the bathroom was enough to make even me feel sick looking at it, and personally I detest cleaning and would not normally be regarded as a clean freak. The grout between the tiles was filthy, to the point that I’d suggest that it may never had been cleaned properly since new. Black/ Red/ Brown stains throughout the bathroom, but at their worst in the shower. Just gross on every level. Again, I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels, cheap ones and expensive ones, and even in the dodgy ones I’ve never seen ANYTHING like this.

The rest of the facilities were acceptable. Just. No parking except for Valet at $25 a night, a bit rough given just about every other hotel in town offers free parking. Dinner was slow to be served, then arrived cold. She who must be obeyed complained and got hers reheated, which probably took 10-15 minutes after waiting 30-40 minutes for the dish to arrive (we were the ONLY customers in the restaurant when we arrived), I was so hungry by this stage I just ate mine cold. My 4 year old then burnt his thumb on an open and exposed light globe at the pay point/ bar. He was offered ice. WTF was a light globe doing sitting out like that in the first place? Let’s see, a great big sign in the toilets informed me I should wash my hands (right), but they cant get basic OH&S set up at the point of sale??

Then there was the curtains. Being in a big city, even be it one that is dead after 6pm means there’s lots of light, from buildings, cars, streetlights etc, all of which happily beamed through our rooms window. We never gave it a second thought until about 11pm after returning to the room from a show. We tried to close the curtains….they don’t close. Yep, we could get them maybe 80% of the way across, then nothing but the bright light shining into our room. She who must be obeyed bought this up with reception the following morning, all she got “I’m very sorry about that, you should have contacted us and we could have changed your room”…at 11pm, with a 4 year old after a big night out? WTF? how about giving us a room with curtains that work and a bathroom that doesn’t have mold dating back to the Jurasic Period growing in the grout??!

So a word of warning to travelers to Perth. Avoid the Holiday Inn Perth like the plague…indeed, given the grime in the rooms you’re just as likely to catch the plague by visiting there. If you’re looking for value in a large group, try the Seville Suites, looking for a straight hotel room, the Novotel if you can get a good rate. Upmarket: Intercontenential Burswood (expensive but worth it).

Tags: Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Perth

It’s the golden child’s first day at school. It only seems like yesterday they were chopping him out of she who must be obeyed’s stomach 🙂

Happy first day at school son, and I know you’ll look forward to reading this post at Archive.org in 2020. We’re proud of you, just a shame about the 13 years of punishment ahead of you, but I know you’ll kick some you know what along the way. I’d expect nothing less. Of course the next step from Lego.com is Adsense and $100 a week…maybe when you turn 6 🙂

With about 20 little projects going on at the moments I realised last week that my ability to remember everything that I was doing was fast fading. I’ve been using ZuluPad for the better part of 18 months, which is a great little software based personal Wiki – notepad on crack program for Windows XP, which I’m happy to recommend to anyone looking for a basic Wiki style program, however as it doesn’t scale well if you’ve got lots and lots of information you need to keep handy, notes to make, links etc. The question then became what next. I took a look around for a software based solution with little luck, somewhere along the line software makers decided that Wiki style programs aren’t in great demand. With a software solution ruled out the next stop was a coded solution – something created to work online but hosted locally, and what better solution than MediaWiki, the platform behind Wikipedia. Sure, I hate the markup required, but as everyone knows it does scale well. Question then became: what’s the best way to set it up? God bless, once again the folks at LifeHacker, who have this excellent guide to setting up MediaWiki on XP. You do need to install WAMP, the all-in-one PHP/MySQL/Apache installation for Windows, which I’d previously used, but the rest is easy. The Nichenet Wiki is up and running…now I’ve just got to fill it full of the stuff I’ll need to remember next week 🙂

You find Melbourne traffic claustrophobic.

Actually it’s more than claustrophobic, it’s completely and utterly f*cking insane, and not in a good way.

The crowds aren’t much better either. I’m sitting here in the food court at the Chadstone Shopping Centre, great shopping…aside from the 5 million people all trying to shop all at once. It reminds me a little bit of New York…but with parking and public toilets.

The smoke haze is something else again. Victoria is suffering from bush fires, and the friendly wind god decided to blow all the smoke over Melbourne. Who needs to smoke when you can walk outside and breath the fresh air 🙂

My blogging will be a little few and far between over the next two weeks, I’m home again in the New Year, but in the mean time I’ve got no fixed internet access…which is ironic really, given I now own a laptop, where as when I traveled to Canada and the US, there was free Wifi everywhere and I didn’t have a laptop.

Seasons greetings to all in case I end up in hospital due to a crazy Victorian driver and cant find somewhere to pay $6 an hour for Wifi in the coming 2 weeks, and may all your Christmases been warm and dry ones.

You’ve got over 1000 unread emails and you can’t be asked cleaning them up. OK, so I’m trying now, but it’s hard to get motivated 🙂

OK, so I’m not one to talk in the physical fitness stakes, but a word to anyone who is interested in The Wiggles, the new Yellow Wiggle, Sam, must have been spending a fair bit of time eating whilst he was under study, because suffice to say, he really jiggles…a lot on stage, indeed, he might want to lose a little weight, because he could quite easily become known as the Fat Wiggle.

And how do I know, we’ll I was at the 1:30pm show last Friday in Perth, the day after the big announcement about Greg leaving. Even though Declan had seen them in concert before, I don’t think for the full hour and a bit did his jaw leave the floor. A great act, and the kids love it.

Tags: The Wiggles

OK, so I promised myself I wasn’t going to bore everyone with to many “f*ck I’m good, I did this today” posts, after all, you’re only ever one step away from iTool and iWankr when you write a personal blog, but I do want to share what I signed up for during the week. You see, for me, mobiles are something I don’t get every day. About half of all the jobs I’ve ever had involved me having a work phone, so my actual possession of something newish and brilliant was always few and far between…indeed it was so far between that my now out going phone (a Nokia 8310) is now 5 years old. So now that I’m rich and famous (not) she who must be obeyed agreed to me getting a new phone, particularly now I don’t have a work phone…or basically a phone some one else is paying for. So I went looking for a phone. I liked the sound of 3G, but the only coverage here at the arse end of the earth was with Telstra, and I’ve hated Telstra since it was Telecom Australia and they use to charge me $1 a minute to make an STD call. OK, so the home line is with them, and I had Bigpong broadband for a while, but that’s only because I knew I’d need to move my service, and because Telstra still owns the last mile it would be quicker if I was signed up with them. Vodafone looked ok… but no 3G coverage and their cheapest plan where you get your phone for free was $49 (AUD). And here’s the thing: on my outgoing plan (which was pay as you go plan) my monthly bills varied between $6 and $60 (AUD). The only time I really use a mobile with any regularity is when I’m traveling, and I don’t do that very often. So in comes Optus. God bless Optus. My very first analogue mobile phone (an 014 service none the less…014226740) was with Optus. My first ever landline when I left home had it’s STD calls with Optus (back then it was Telecom/ Telstra for your phone and you only just had the option of Optus instead of Telecom for your STD calls…they were 40c a minute BTW, and for memory 20c/ minute late at night). Maybe I’m getting old, but when most telco’s base plan starts now at $49…well I can remember when $50 a month was the top plan and you’re plans started at $10 a month with a phone (insert old fogey noise here). Anyhow, $29 a month over 2 years including the phone and $29 a month in calls. That just suits me down to the ground. So there you have it. I’ve got a Nokia 6280. It has a 2 megapixel camera, nearly as good as my own seperate digital camera. It takes movies and comes with a mini-SD Ram slot and card. They’ve given me free internet/ Zoo service for the first two months and the golden child loves watching ABC kids on the phone on the way to daycare in the morning. And one last thing…it works in Hong Kong and Canada, so I’ll have a working phone whilst I’m away…that after all was the real reason I needed a new phone 😉

Tags: Nokia 6280