For all the Canadians out there….

Culture en Péril

Or with captioning Culture en Péril

Well, I don’t know which one is funnier, but it is a bit scary too.

Humor

Reality

Once again, Adobe CS4 costs about $400.00 AUD more to purchase from the Australian store than from the US store.

Today, $1399 US = ($1399/.8375) = $1670.45 AUD

Adobe Australia sells the CS4 package for $2089 AUD, that is $418 AUD more than I could buy it from the US store (if I could buy it from the US). It is a download, no physical delivery at all.

When I queried Adobe about this for CS3 they said it was for 1 year of tech support. Hands up any one who has actually needed to use Adobe’s tech support rather than just using Goggle to find an answer?

I am almost tempted to buy it and see how much I could use the tech support over a year. I am sure I could rack up a few thousand dollars of someone’s time over a year…..

This is why I refuse to buy it. The day it is roughly the same cost here as in the states, I probably will buy it, but until then, I will use The Gimp and GraphicConverter.

This is the best!

Mom, Dad, I have dibs on the real one of these out at the cottage it must be a collectors item!

Macworld | iPhone Central | Review: LED Football for iPhone

This one is really unbelievable. Even leaving aside the terrorism issue, how many people would know that their neighbourhoods hydrants are turned off. Lucky they did not lose a life here instead of just priceless photos.

Are the fire hydrants in your neighborhood turned on?

(Via Schneier on Security ).

This is for all you facebook users out there. Told you they were evil!

Terms Of Disservice: The 5 most laughable terms of service on the Net

(Via ValleyWag.)

Chris and I taught another advanced course over the weekend.

Students Kaela, Julie, Bruce, Laurianne and Helene all completed the course. Gavin has now completed his DM course too!

Here are the two photogenic instructors.

I am happy to say, after a short email discussion with Oceanic Australia, the Australian distributors of the Princeton Tec line, a good outcome was reached.

From Oceanic Australia:

I have just spoken to our senior service technician and he assures me that putting the batteries in (backwards) will not cause the module to fry.

What I have learned from him though, is that our early stocks of Impact XL’s had a faulty module which on random occasions was susceptible to burn out. This problem has since been rectified in manufacturing and we rarely see returns of this model now. In fact the Impact XL is now one of our most problem free torches in the Princeton range.

Anyone who has this problem would have their torch replaced.

I read somewhere:

Every company makes mistakes. It is how they fix their mistakes that sets the good ones apart.

I am happy to say that Oceanic Australia has fixed this issue to my satisfaction. In the past I have had nothing but good dealings with Oceanic, and I wish I had known they were the Princeton Distributors when I first had the problem.

I can once again recommend the Princeton Tec Impact XL LED torch.

I was off line for a week due to my ADSL connection going down.

Did anyone notice?

chirp chirp …. As usual, the symptoms were bizarre. The ISP had move my POP to a new IP, so I bounced the router to pick up the new IP. Things were working well before hand.

After restarting, my rate was half of what it should be. So I restarted again, and it was down to 1/4.

Then 1/8th

1/16th

1/32nd

Nada

After some profile changes and resets and some helpdesk issues, I finally got a tech out who found a fault on the copper.

Why did it only appear after I reset my router? Who knows….

In any case I am now back up and with a slightly higher speed than before.

I had a great trip, weather could have been better, but it was better than working!

We did get to see lots of dwarf minke whales!

See diving pictues

See people pictures