An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

http://www.lacie.com/company/news/news.htm?id=10246

I want one! *drools*

If you are wondering why all my posts have weird text it is because of Talk like a Pirate day.

(Google it if you don’t believe me!)

Where do all the cool kids hang out for their regular geeky news these days?

Slashdot is getting worse & worse lately, Engadget is good for news on all the geek toys (Even though it runs on IIS! Probably why it doesn’t cope well with live events…) and Macrumors is good for my Mac fix but the lack of quality on Slashdot leaves a big hole for general stuff.

Today I decided I would have a serious look at Ruby On Rails so at first I thought I’d download the PDF of Agile Web Development with Rails as hey it’s a PDF and it should display nicely on my PDA so I can read it on the go and not have to lug around a text book but of course that assumption was wrong and of course I didn’t download the sample chapters first so now I have the PDF that I can only really read on the computer, which is kind of lame.

So tonight off we went to the local Barnes & Noble and then onto the local Borders so I could get the hard copy and not have to wait for shipping but of course neither have it in stock and it would take 5-7 days to get it into stock, where if I had have ordered it from Amazon before we went out to get it then I would have had it tomorrow!

Not happy Jan!

So I was walking past Cingular after lunch today with a coworker and Cingular had the Motorola ROKR (you know the iTunes phone) on display where you could use it and even had earphones attached. Well at first I was impressed, pressed the little green iTunes button, browsed around an iPod like interface fairly quickly but as soon as you start playing a song you can say hello to lag from hell, we’re talking worse than the lag between selecting icons on my s710a.

A big “no thanks” on that one!

If anyone out there is interested in attending an AFL Grand Final party in Houston on Friday 23rd September 2005 (Coverage starts at 11:00pm) then please leave a comment to this post, I am currently looking at arranging such a party but the more people I can get the better leverage I have in securing a venue especially seeing how the match will go past the silly 2:00am limit that Texas has.

One thing Australia has had going for it for the longest time is its dominance in world cricket but that is close to coming to an end as they find themselves in a position where it is near impossible to win, first they need to bowl England out and then score 2 or more runs on every single remaining ball of the day plus pray that the light stays good enough for stumps not to be called early, so yeah we’re screwed!

I had just rejuvinated my Aussie pride too after my holiday back home in July/August but they keep letting me down, first the Rugby and now the Cricket!

Today we went and played paint ball for the first time with some guys from Megan’s work at some really hard to find place down I-45 South, which makes me wonder just how legal is it in Texas? Their sign was tiny and very hard to see!

It was a real blast though, borrowed all the equipment from one of her co-workers who had like half a dozen guns so it only cost us $25 each for the whole day to get air refills and the use of a ref & the grounds to fight on. However as you can see from the T being in parentheses in the title, those little balls hurt like nothing else, I have a few nice little bruises from it but damn was it ever worth it!

Now I just need to go out and buy all my own gear!

I have just launched 911 Blogs to provide those affected by Hurricane Katrina a free hosted Wordpress web log that will be free of advertising.

Please visit the site for details on how to get your very own blog with an address of http://yourname.911blogs.com.

I already have an open offer out to offer Wordpress hosting for all who are interested but thought I’d add another post about it, this time specifically in case any Hurrican Katrina evacuees/refugees want to start a web log to keep friends and family infomed of what is going on or even if they just want to share their thoughts on their experience to the world.

I would prefer to limit any such hosting to Wordpress installs only but will consider any other reasonable requests so if you are interested please leave me a comment here or email me at jbainbridge@gmail.com.