Sunday, November 14, 2004

On holidays!

Posted by AmishThrasher at 1:53 pm
ALT TEXT
Melbourne at night
Something I have more time for...
Well, the exams are over and done with! All my essays are handed in, and I've re-enrolled for next year. Which means more time to update this blog, and possibly some of my essays from over the year appearing on here.

Sorry about the lack of updates over the past month. I had 3 essays and an exam all due around the same time (one of which ended up blowing out to 40 pages!), which ate up a lot of my spare time. I finished up at LaTrobe as of Thursday, when I handed in a philosophy essay (for philosophy), got my last philosophy essay back, and did my politics exam. During the weeks before I got a politics and media essay in. As I said, when I get a chance I'll put some of those essays online.

Friday night I celebrated with a friend's 21st at Noise Bar in Brunswick (on Albert Street, just next to Brunswick station). Some local bands played, and while small and with a very limited bar, it seems to be a good venue for live bands. I got back from that at something like 3.30 am. Also managed to catch up with some people - a good night overall.

Aside from that, I got a few new tech-toys to play with.

First off, I upgraded the iMac from OSX 1.5 to OSX Jaguar 3.5. Safari, iCal, and iChat are nice additions. Also upgraded iLife (which means I have Garage Band), but I need a DVD drive before I can use it (then again, after a rebate it worked out to be free with OSX). Also got a D-Link DBT 120, making the Mac bluetooth compatible.

The next new tech toy I bought was a Nokia N-Gage QD. I read reviews of the original N-Gage, and decided to get the new model; it's a very nice phone. Two things about it though: first, it doesn't come with an MP3 player built in; you have to load one yourself. Secondy, you really need an MMC card if you do want a lot of photos, and the like. And third, while it is possible to send bluetooth files to the QD, you can't send them directly to the MMC card; instead they appear like an SMS message and you have to copy them across from there. To get around this, I got a 6-in-1 card reader. That said, with the card reader and the D-Link, the QD works very well with the Mac; it's fairly easy to get the iCal / calendar and Address Book to iSync, and it's easy to to move files to an MMC card with a card reader: when you put an MMC card in the reader, it appears in Finder like any hard disk or CD ROM drive.

The only thing that has really annoyed me so far about it is Optus. With a new phone, I selected some pollyphonic ringtones from the Optus Zoo website. I got the SMS from Optus okay, however each time I try downloading it I get a HTTP 403: No Server Access error. Aside from this, games and logos download fine. I called Optus' tech support about it, and they claimed it was a problem with their GPRS network.

Anyway, been talked into possibly going to the Falls Festival this year. I also have a whole bunch of people to catch up with, and that's what I've been up to the past few weeks.

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