Any set of characters

Ever bought a Virgin Blue gift voucher?

Then you’ll know what a bad outcome that is!

You see, Virgin Blue sells gift vouchers online and they will mail you the voucher via the post.

But you can’t redeem the voucher online, you have to phone their call center to place the reservation.

But calling their call center incurs a $15 cost, each way, per ticket.

So, a $100 voucher, for two people to travel return to sydney winds up only shaving about $40 off the ticket, the other $60 is spent redeeming the voucher via the phone call!

This stinks!

Ah, another day, another exquisite trip with Cityrail

I was greeted at the door of my train by my personal hostess, who escorted me to my seat and supplied me with a freshly squeezed fruit juice. What I love about the evening trains is the in-trip movies - full dolby surround sound, free popcorn and complimentary foot massages.

Tomorrow I’ll be in the breakfast carriage, fresh muffins and hot coffee here I come! Okay, maybe not, maybe it was more like this:

• Train two carriages short.
• Had to sit in the aisle
• Watched a bad movie on my laptop (’God’s and Generals’)
• Sore butt / leg cramps
• Got a seat after 1hr 20min
• Home 30 minutes late

Hurrah for public transport! Down with cars!

I’ve been eying up a rather large set of books in recent months

Yes, Shelby Foote’s 3 volume tome, ‘The Civil War’.

Whats been putting me off is the price, at $AU69.95 per volume and with three volumes its a little on the expensive side.

So I had a look at Amazon yesterday, and to my delight, they are selling ALL THREE for around $US42.00 - with postage, thats about $62.00 - or a good $140 less than buying it in Australia off my local bookshop.

Its not the bookshops fault, its the publishers.   But at that price difference, they deserve to have their market killed.

Anyway, it should arrive in the mail in about 2-3 weeks.

Read this article on crickey.com.au, and you’ll see what I mean.

Sounds like a lovely chap…

Today I was playing with setting up RoundCube - the webmail / IMAP client which I’d just discovered.

It soon became apparent that I needed to setup a subdomain and mysql db, so I ran through doing that with the dreamhost control panel.

As I waited for dreamhost to do its thing, clicking refresh every 30 seconds I was struck by the thought… is this really the most valid use of my time, hitting the reload button like a diseased monkey, hoping that a DNS propagation was going to make it to my laptop …

So I went and mowed the front and back lawns instead.

Sadly, my whipper snipper (weed wacker) lost its protective shield - it seems at some point, all FOUR restraining screws have fallen out.

Anyway, I’ll post the instructions for setting up RoundCube and my review at some point - I’m on my third beer and the final of the australian open is about to begin!

I just got a second hand Sony Ericsson 910 from work.

It’s got lots of bells and whistles and its almost addicted to the internet, it just won’t stop connecting and it even seems to surf real sites very easily - this blog for instance seems to convert to mobile usage quite easily!

Except….

Its obscenely expensive…. How expensive this is my bill for the last day: $14.00 spent, for aroud 700kB, my rough math, my 2GB of broadbad would cost around $100,000 to using GRPS with Telstra. I’ve disabled internet access now… until I win lotto

One of my wife’s friends has recently returned from england and brought back our favourite thing:  7 bars of Galaxy chocolate!

I just ate the rest of a bar, and its not even lunch time…. not good.

I should be raking leaves, concreting, putting washing on, writing code, uploading latest release of a private project…

I need a todo list….  I wonder if theres any software on the net for that… perhaps I could write some… noooooo……

It’d be Unaustralian not to!