The Home of Tom & Morven

I donated to Shaun.

Tuesday morning I went to the dentist. I was in a state of shock because he told me that I need fillings done on a couple teeth. This is big news to me because Morven thinks I have OCD of cleaning my teeth rather fastidiously. My dentists over the last decade have always congratulated me for having “teeth of the week” or whatever. From short discussions with my dentist and hygienist it seems like the suddenly large amounts of electrolyte drinks I’ve consumed this last summer is responsible for my suddenly I have tooth decay. Thanks Powerade.

(Note that I was going to insert a picture of a Powerade bottle here with an “equals” sign followed by a picture of rotting teeth, but decided against it as the ones my search engine found look rather horrible!)

Anyway, in my state of shock I went to go jump on my motorbike, but… what the!?!? What on earth is a flaming scooter doing parked right up my arse? This was opposite the Royal Adelaide Hospital on North Terrace.

My bike was parked in the motorcycle park, with my wheel right up against the curb. A scooter had parked right up my arse with it’s front wheel almost touching my wheel. There were free parks. No idea what possesses someone to park like that. Why would you illegally double-park a motorbiker, when you could illegally park just next to the motorcycle parks and not be in anyone’s way? What is a scooter even doing parking anywhere near a sign that says “Motorcycle parking”? How did the scooter think I would be able to get out? What was there to stop me from pushing the scooter over? Regardless, was pushing the scooter over an invitation? So many questions, so little answers. The only thing stopping me from wheeling the scooter down the road to teach the learner scooter rider a lesson was the fact that I was pretty sure it’d be knocked over before the end of the day anyway, as the arse of the scooter was close enough to the traffic of North Terrace.

For purposes of public shame, I present the number plate of the scooter.

Mike Rann has decided to desalinate water for Adelaide rather than what I believe is the more environmentally choice of recycling wastewater (i.e. effluent).  ABC News reports that a deal has been struck to build a pilot plant at Pt Stanvac.

ABC News - Pt Stavac desal plant

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Do you know what everyone is talking about when they talk about how the US economy is slumping due to the subprime mortgage market? I only vaguely knew, so I’m thankful to Shaun who sent me this hilarious take on what the subprime mortgage crisis is.

Before you watch this PowerPoint Slideshow, it is important to know what it really is. Wikipedia explain subprime lending much better than I ever would:

Subprime lending (also known as B-paper, near-prime, or second chance lending) is lending at a higher rate than the prime rate. The term “subprime” refers to the credit status of the borrower (being less than ideal), not the interest rate on the loan itself.

The Subprime Primer (contains bad language)

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Today Adelaide broke a new record for the number of consecutive days 35 degrees celcius. A news article was just released on the web about it, and I’ve archived it for downloading just below.

Record heatwave in Adelaide ABC News Broadcast

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The hot weather has been frustrating because it means if I want to do some training for my cross country mountain biking, I have to do it really early in the morning. Even then, it’s still around 30 degrees just after sunrise. I tried going riding after work at the start of the heat wave which is when I got heat stroke. At least not only have we beaten the previous 1934 record (when records first began), but we’re set to smash it!! It makes everyone’s winging worthwhile. Below is a screenshot of our official weather forecast from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

I stumbled upon this website today that I would really like to point out to people. It’s called “Tell The Truth Telstra”, and it completely explains in full detail, why the government’s cooperation with Telstra to roll out a National Broadband Network would actually not be as good as it sounds. I’ll let you read for yourself.

http://tellthetruthtelstra.com.au

A recent letter from a local politician to myself was flogging the fact that she was supporting the national broadband network. I wrote a letter back to her enquiring about my concerns, and I have not heard back from her! I guess this means she didn’t know what the real implications of a national broadband network rolled out by Telstra and only by Telstra would do to the market.

Whilst I’m at it, I can’t resist but put yet another screen capture of an Optus website not working again.

I got an SMS today from Optus - an advertisement text message about a new service where if you specify 5 phone numbers you call regularly you get extra credit each month. Thinking this is perhaps actually worth my time setting up, I go to the Optus website and try to register an account.

In the login screen, I get to the password stage, so I randomly generate a 150bit password using software I use to translate mouse and key input into a randomly generated password. It took a minute for me to realise that the maximum alphanumerals it can contain is 20. Then it took me another minute to realise that it can only be between 3 and 20 alphanumerals. So I try one 19 long which is now only 105bit cipher strength instead of 150bit. Geez who are these people dictating what the maximum cipher strength we’re allowed to have in our accounts. It’s not like a few extra digits here or there on their servers is going to overload their server!

Anyway, five minutes later, and using a password as simple as testpassword123 didn’t work. I then tried using Internet Explorer, and it still didn’t work. Determined, I went back to Mozilla Firefox, and about ten minutes later, I found a password that worked! The password was (don’t be concerned I’ve already changed it) Optusisshit01. No kidding, it’s the only password I could get that worked!

Happy with this (albeit 60bit cipher strength) password, I logged into the Optus Web Account and discovered I then had to “link an account” to this web account, even though the web account required my phone number as part of allowing me to setup a web account. Go figure.

Anyway, so I click on the Link Account option, and get this:

Deciding I should probably change my original password considering I’m publishing what it was on the internet, I go to change my password. This time, they are more flexible with the password options, and don’t specify the maximum length it needs to be. They also specify you can use other characters too! How nice. However, the proof is in the pudding:

Another five minutes later, I eventually find another password that works. FYI adding an extra numeral to the end of the original didn’t work, nor to the start of it! It seems you have to actually use passwords that undermine Optus in order for the password to work. As funny as it is, I won’t tell you what this second password is because then I’ll have to try to change it again, and I’m running low on patience as it is Thinking now that I don’t want to be disappointed and find out later that my password isn’t really working even though I’m logged in at the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to logout and login again, just to check I can use this password more than once. Upon clicking on login after logging out, I get this:

This is the first time a website has demanded that I restart my web browser apart from after installing more software, a plugin/extension, or a codec of some description. Now I just give up. Optus can take their Optus Turbo MyTime, and ***** it up their ****, because this is MY time you’re wasting.

I’m allowed to say this, right!?!?

Eventually though, I managed to get to the linking of account screen by clicking on the other link. It seems the first was just a red herring to keep you on your toes.

So in the screen that I get to, which I thought was for linking a mobile phone account to my mobile phone web account, I come across yet another road block:

I’ll admit that it’s possible I’ve been distracted by the fact that I’m blogging about how bad the optus website is, and it’s possible I may have mis-read critical information which resulted in me ending up in the broadband internet side of Optus. Which reminds me, I should also blog about why not to use Optus or Telstra as your ISP (Internet Service Provider) - I have so many bad stories about people getting screwed over by those two companies. Anyway, back to the topic on hand. I think I got to this point on the website not just because I’m distracted by blogging. I think it’s partly to do with the stupid amounts of bright colours and annoying flash animations that are going on. Speaking of which, I couldn’t even load the website at work (note to SWK/ABR: it was on unpaid time, after work hours, whilst I had a few minutes to kill before heading off to a training seminar) to work because if you don’t have flash installed, you just can’t load the website AT ALL.

So now I go back to the original text message I got from Optus, scroll further down on my phone, and find that you have to ring a phone number to setup the new benefits of Optus MyTime. You are greeted by a machine which gives a 5 minute spill about the new benefits and the new contract. It then tells you to press ‘1′ to switch to the new contract. But hang on a second, I don’t recall “off the top of my head” what call rates I’m paying, so I suspect this new MyTime is really just a trick for them to get out of their original contract. This is where I cut my losses and go to bed, it’s just too difficult. I have no information from Optus that directly compares the deal that I currently have, with this new deal they are offering. It’s like someone offering me a much more tastier pizza, but then after I’ve already accepted, I find out it’s a much smaller pizza.

If you enjoyed reading this and want to hear about my recent experience with Telstra putting “Telstra Home Messaging” on our home phone (without us knowing) and then not being able to turn it off once we realised, and then refusing to accept there is a fault in the system which wouldn’t allow us to turn it off ourselves, and then getting angry at me when I tried to convince them that I shouldn’t have to call up more than ten times.

Did you know you can offset the damage you do everyday to the environment with your vehicle by purchasing carbon credits? Now that you know, you don’t have any excuse for not doing it other than being a cheapskate Thanks to my brother I can get away with being a cheapskate, because he just bought enough carbon credits for my motorbike to be carbon neutral until June 2008. Cheers Mike!

Check out the Carbon Neutral sticker on my windscreen, and the Carbon Neutral keyring. Very classy!

Did you know that if you live in Australia for the amount of money you can spend on a rainwater tank, for the purpose of saving the River Murray you would be better to spend the money on purchasing water rights.

My brother gave me water rights for my birthday - best present ever!

Check out waterfind.com.au and purchase yours today!