Stupid QANTAS

I've been flying with Virgin Blue since they started and if I had any lingering doubts about returning to QANTAS, this past weekend has resolved them. The only problem that flying with Virgin Blue causes is that they only fly into Launceston, a two hour drive from home. To make it easier, I decided to fly QANTAS into Devenport instead. I will not be making the same mistake again.

I caught a taxi to the airport at 12:10 and checked in to find that my flight had been cancelled, but I'd be able to get the next flight after that and still make my connection. This was fine with me, it just meant I'd be spending the hour wait at Canberra instead of Melbourne. We landed in Melbourne at 14:25 (the time my next flight was supposed to start boarding) and I rushed to the departures screen to determine which gate my next flight departed from, only to find that it too had been cancelled.

I eventually found a customer service desk with staff and discovered that, yet again, I'd have to catch a later flight. In an attempt, I suppose, to make up for some of the inconvenience they gave me a voucher to get a meal. Melbourne airport is a particularly boring place, though the numerous and frequent announcements about delayed, rescheduled, redirected, reassigned and cancelled flights did keep me (and the throngs of other affected passengers) somewhat entertained.

At the end of the day, QANTAS got me to Devenport more than three and a half hours later than my itinerary (booked not three days previous) stated, thereby inconveniencing myself and my family and resolving any doubt in my mind as to whether I'd be returning to QANTAS.

At the other end of the spectrum, the QANTAS ground and cabin crew were pleasant and helpful. It's a pity their logistics aren't as good as their service.

I'm on my Way...

The mid-semester holiday starts, for me, when I submit my second report for Milestone Papers in Computing, that is, tomorrow morning. Rather than spend the next few weeks in cold, wet Canberra, I'm going to wet, cold Tasmania.

While I'm there, my Internet access will be rather limited and I hope, in-spite (or perhaps because of) this, to get a lot of work done on my honours project.

Stupid Blinking Lights

I have never liked strobing lights. From flashing on the TV screen, to lights at clubs, flashing lights make me uncomfortable. I doubt that it is photosensitive epilepsy.

Lately, I've been irritated by the banner adds for the US Green Card Lottery (or whatever it is called). For some reason, someone has decided that a large blinking red/yellow block would be the best way to advertise the Green Card Lottery (which, in my opinion, has to be the single stupidest way to manage an immigration system).

I'm not sure if it has effected any photosensitive epileptics, but it sure as hell shits me off something chronic!

Web 2.0

I've been playing with some of the tools that people are talking about when they mention the Web 2.0 or, at least, the current day ancestors of those future systems:

CafeSpot
del.icio.us
Tag Cloud
CiteULike

Spam - The Other Pink Gelatinous Substance

I just received a spam (regarding lifestyle medication) with the following as its filter-avoidance random text...

I like the word 'indolence.' it makes my laziness seem classy.
Gossip is sometimes referred to as halitosis of the mind
What's another word for Thesaurus?
Money is good for bribing yourself through the inconveniences of life.

Perhaps spam is turning over a new leaf and attempting to contribute something back to the Internet, even if it is a few bad jokes that only a person such as myself would find amusing.

Tomb of Thomas Sutton

Tomb of Thomas Sutton

I like finding interesting things about my name.

Well that was interesting...

I've just been poking at my iPod mini's innards (in the software sense) and had a bit of a scare. It started when my quitting iTunes somehow managed to knacker something or other causing iTunes to crash on start-up, without fail. After a few attempts to fix it (including nuking my playlists, damn it!), I unplugged my iPod, and iTunes started working again.

Mystified, I started poking around in the iPod volume on the shell and, let me tell you, it is a lot more interesting from the command line. In Finder, all you can see are the Calendars, Contacts and Notes folders. From the command line, you get all sorts of junk ('Desktop DB' and 'Desktop DF', the spotlight index, .Trashes, etc) including a folder called iPod_Control. In iPod_Control, there is all sorts of interesting stuff including the music files themselves (in 'iPod_Control/Music/') and some miscellaneous data (in 'iPod_Control/iTunes/').

Nuking 'iPod_Control/iTunes/' had the effect of fixing my problem, with the side effect of making iTunes (and perhaps the iPod, I didn't check) unaware of the music on my iPod. I won't have time for a while, but I'm going to have to poke around in there some more...

Work for Idle Hands

After a meeting with my supervisor, I've decided that this week is the last straw - if I can't manage to get a handle on my pile of assignments this week, then I obviously don't want to be here right now. I had a bit of a go at some of it last night and seemed to get on all right.

If I can finish my report on neural networks by tonight, read the Google papers (the original paper and that on map-reduce) and get a good way through the first algorithms assignment tomorrow, I think I'll get there.

Procrastination...

I can't help but wonder if my current bout of procrastination is self sabotage. Perhaps, deep down, I don't want to be a computer scientist?

Speaking

It's 2152 on Saturday, and I've just spoken my fourth word for the weekend (In case anyone cares, the were two 'hello's, a 'thanks' and a 'cheers'). One day, I'm going to see just how long I can go without speaking (to another person, as I can't help but speak to myself).