Humility

admin —  January 21, 2008 — 10 Comments

I’ve been tossing up this week how I should post about this result. To simply go out and boast about the result would simply make me out to be a complete and utter wanker, and I know some of you think that, but lets spend at least 30 minutes together and correct that perception.

I am truly humbled that my peers would see it fit to vote for me as Australia’s top web celeb. If I was to be fair, I could probably argue about the distribution of the voting, and I’m sure I could find a way to dispute the results as well, indeed I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t find that angle. But having said that I hope that those who did vote for me knew that, that ultimately my word and honesty is hopefully my strongest qualities.

I don’t always get it right, and in my 9 odd months at TechCrunch I’ve had my fair share of wrongens as well as hits. Like anything it’s a numbers game where you hope that you get it right more times than you get it wrong, but I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always get it right, be it at TechCrunch, or even in my past endevours. If I ever start forgetting that fact I’d only hope that someone will track me down and beat me around the head with a wet fish. The person who thinks they are always right is a flawed human being, ultimately we are all human and all humans make mistakes. What differentiates one person from another is that some make less mistakes than others. I hope that at 32 years of age (so compared with many in the industry, old) that wisdom is slightly the right/ wrong equation in my favour.

I know that attention can go to ones head…put me in a crowd at a TechCrunch event where everyone wants to be your friend because you might be able to deliver for them with a post is a bloody good example. This is my 3rd trip to SFO and the Valley since I started writing for TechCrunch and it’s still thick with people doing just that. To be fair there are positives to the hardcore “networking” experience. I’ve had the opportunity to meet some amazing people, and no I’m not name dropping here because often its the relatively unknown folks that make the biggest impressions. I even enjoy my interactions with the PR ppl as well, but only on some levels because my background was in some form or another was nearly always PR and marketing related. Call me a voyeur but I love watching some of them work, its fascinating, and at the same time its borderline worlds best as well.

My thanks to those who voted for me, and if I can ever return the favor, karma dictates that I should. I may be godless in my belief system but I still solidly believe that something in the universe balances out good and bad, that karma is in play. I’ve seen those who have wronged me, or more particularly my family in the past get their just deserts with time which is why ultimately I believe that what goes around, comes around. I only hope that despite my flaws and weaknesses that I can manage to put the balance in my favor in the future.

Given when I first traveled to the United States in November 2006 I came home to a $998 Optus bill, I’ve been really, really shy on subsequent trips about using my mobile for anything. The roaming charges on Optus are insanely expensive, some calls are $2.50 a minute, and for memory it’s $1.30 to receive calls or similar.

Given I’m State side for 2 weeks this trip (I’ve been here a week as I write this) I ventured down the pre-paid local sim card route. T-Mobile offered the best deal…but has no coverage at TC central in Atherton, which left me with AT&T only (of the 4 major telcos in the US, 2 offer GSM, 2 offer CDMA, the iPhone is GSM).

First the travelers tip. I needed a way to divert my phone to a US number without the massive expense of Optus international. So this is what I did.

1. Buy a Skype-in number for Australia. In my case it was an 03 Melbourne number as the wife is already there and I’ll be based there soon (we’re half the way through moving to Melbourne).

2. Divert Optus mobile number to the 03 number. I think it was something like 25c/ min or less.

3. Divert the Skype-in number to the AT&T sim. Skype charges about 3c a minute for the diverted call.

Now the AT&T pre-paid card charges 25c USD a minute to receive calls, expensive, but it works out at about 50-60c a minute to take a call made to my original number, as opposed to $1.25 / minute or more if I just used the Optus sim on global roaming. Most importantly, the diverted call counts again my plan, where as internation roaming would be extra, so that 60c might be less that 35c/ minute in actual costs to me.

Now back to AT&T. I’d been in one of their stores previously with Marty Wells of Tangler, so I knew it was going to be bad. It still was. Whereas a Telstra shop is always busy (at least the one in Bunbury is) and you often have to wait, but you queue for that, AT&T works on a door greater/ take your name basis. So you enter the store and the store greater puts your name on a list and you wait to be called. My trip this time took 20 minutes to be called despite the store not being that busy, it’s that slow. Buying the SIM card wasn’t that hard when I was eventually called, and I had a number.

Nearly a week later and the pre-paid SIM has run out. I only bought $25 worth of credit and you pay 25c/ min for incoming and outgoing calls, that and data at 1c a kb…and of course with an iPhone it’s hard to avoid data.

So I went to the AT&T Palo Alto store today. There’s a machine that looks like an ATM that allows you to top up your credit. I swipe my Australian Visa (debit) and nothing, wont work. Try again, nothing. I’ve just got enough for the min $15 USD top up so I feed the money into the machine, then wait…and wait…and wait. “Communications error” and a printed receipt saying I should dial through the number on the receipt for a credit. I didn’t want to wait 30 minutes to talk to someone directly?Ǭ† (this time it was really busy) so I left. Got back, dialed the number, entered the number on the receipt. “This is an invalid number”. Try two more times, same response.

So I call AT&T customer service. I can’t emphasise enough how much further call centre “voice recognition” has advanced in the US as compared to Australia. 5 minutes of telling the machine what I wanted. Told the wait is 60 seconds, then 10 minutes later I speak to someone. After repeating myself 5 times (apparently my Australian accent is difficult to understand) I’m told that I’ve got the wrong department, and I’d be transfered. Get transfered to a message that says you’ve called out of hours, please call a special after hours number if you still need help. Called that number…it wasn’t AT&T’s number, unless I wrote it down wrong.

So despite already having a credit I decide to try the website because I want a working mobile. Type my details into the website, they want the billing address for the Visa, I put it in and get an error message telling me I have to select a state, despite the drop down only offering “Australia -other” and trying to select it over and over and over again.

End of the day I’ve got a useless phone until I call AT&T in the morning, so don’t try and ring me. I’ll also promise to never criticize Telstra customer service again. Despite there many failings, I’ve always been able to speak to a real person who could help me when I’ve needed it with Telstra (our home landline is with Telstra), AT&T on the other hand makes them look brilliant. I guess anything like this should always be in context, and now I’ve seen the worst.

Where’s The Cheese?

admin —  January 18, 2008 — 6 Comments

Peter Russell Clarke outtakes from the 80’s. Language NSFW via FullTimeCasual on Twitter. LMAO.

I WANT I WANT I WANT I WANT I WANT

6.8mb download, under 3 seconds. 1mb, so quick I didn’t see the download bar. 30mb ftp upload, minutes

Macworld Keynote 2008

admin —  January 16, 2008 — Leave a comment

You can see my live blogging record here, or the photo’s I’ve uploaded so far on Flickr here. Obviously the announcements weren’t as great as last year, but at least this time I was in the audience watching it live.
Macworld Keynote

Blu-ray Vs HD DVD

admin —  January 16, 2008 — Leave a comment

Clever.

I forgot to post this yesterday. John Birmingham, the author of perhaps the best series of books I’ve read in the last 12 months, the Axis of Time series (World War 2.1, 2.2 + 2.3) has posted an extract from the new book he is writing here. WOW! The alternative reality stuff just sucks me in again.

On The Pod #17: Mick Liubinskas

admin —  January 10, 2008 — 3 Comments

Mick Liubinskas joins me for On The Pod #17 as we talk Forums 2.0 (link)

Also you can subscribe to On The Pod in iTunes by clicking here.

On last bleg, if you’re feeling generous you can vote for On The Pod in the Performancing Awards here. Voting closes 10 January US time. I’m still stunned that I’d be nominated up against Calacanis. My many thanks to those who have already voted and for those who nominated me.

Its sad that at 5 the boy has pretty much outgrown them. I’ve seen them live twice. This video via Library Stuff

Another day, another its all about kiddie porn line from the censorship lovers, this time its Child Wise CEO Bernadette McMenamin in the Oz (link).

According to McMenamin

IT is beyond belief that some representatives of the Australian internet service provider industry are reluctant to install filters that would prevent access to child pornography.

Surely any decent person would do all they can to protect children. However there exists a small but vocal group in Australia which is opposed to the federal Government?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s proposal to introduce mandatory ISP filtering to block child pornography and other illegal content.

Notice once again that the backers keep talking about child pornography but not the actual plan, which is to block a whole lot more than that, and content outside of porn as well.

No reasonable or sane person believes in child pornography, but lets be very, very clear on this point: kiddie porn is ALREADY illegal to distribute and even view. If they know where this stuff is hosted, why wouldn’t the Government, in conjunction with overseas countries work to get it taken down and the sickos locked up (or castrated)?

Then there’s the other places argument

Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the United Kingdom have ISP-based filters in place blocking child pornography to the majority of Internet users in those countries. Reports show that these filters are very effective

Correct, but again, they block child porn only and I believe in the case of England we’re talking a couple of thousand websites, NOT millions as the Australian Government is proposing to block on anything and everything they deem we shouldn’t be viewing.

Small scale filtering works because the number of sites blocked is so small that it has no major affect of internet access speed, indeed implementing it would be fairly easy. Under the Australian Governments proposal our speeds would drop between 17% and 78% simply because every time you typed in a web address it would have to be checked against a database of millions of sites, not a short list as is the case in England.

I’m still very, very much against the current Government’s internet censorship proposal, but if it were a block kiddie porn only model I’d reconsider my opposition.

(thanks to Bryce for the link)