You know, that's not too bad....

     So, I tend to have a little fascination with bad foodstuffs.  Over-processed, wrongly coloured, bad flavour combinations, things like that.  I got a free sample of this "Dilmah Exceptional Peppermint & English Toffee Real Leaf Tea" on a magazine recently.  Looking at that name, I was sure this would be right up my alley.
     Well it is... But only because I drink a lot of tea.  The black tea flavour is pretty mild, the toffee adds a nice sweet flavour and the peppermint leaves a nice fresh feel in the mouth.  I'm not sure I'd drink it everyday, but it has some definite pleasant qualities about it.  I'm almost dissapointed. :)

Really?

Is it wrong that I found the strangest thing about this article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10207486.stm that people actually have up to €1000 dollars invested in virtual goods for Habbo hotel.
Honestly, if anybody wants to spend this much money on something they can't hold - send me a new laptop and I'll send 'em back a picture of it.

I bet the Habbo admins haven't just reinstated the "stolen" furniture because they expect these guys will be gullible enough to repurchase it.  *Sigh*

/rant

eBook Gripes

  So, lately I've become quite a fan of reading eBooks rather than physical ones. Yes real books are nice, and much more durable when accidentally dropped in the bath, but the convenience and instant availability of eBooks is a real winner for me. Plus they are cheaper, and cheaper is often a bonus.

  Availability in Australia is a real pain though. I can't wait for the day that there is one common format, and all the books available in print are available electronically. I think that day may be more than a few years off though.
     So far the majority of my eBooking has been on an iPhone via the Kindle app.  I was really excited when Borders made their eReader available.  Ok, so it may only be a Borders branded kobo app, but it does look a lot nicer IMHO.  Besides which, the main benefit of the Borders app was some competition for Kindle.  (The B&N eReader is available in Australia, has been for ages, but the books aren't - interesting marketing you got there B&N.)
     Anyway, I grabbed a sample book (The Night Angel Trilogy if anybody is interested, it's kind of trashy but I chew through a lot of books) and was almost immediately caught up in it.  Great I thought, I'll buy this one - and so much cheaper than I expected, it was a price I would expect to pay for one book of the trilogy as a paperback.  However, it's vanished from the Borders eBookstore, oops!  Probably I got it off the international store because somebody flicked the wrong switch when turning on the backend for the Borders app?
     Now if I want to keep reading I need to buy the books elsewhere, blegh.  I can get them as an eBook from Amazon, which is fine.... Except I need to buy all three individual books, it'll cost me a lot more than the price for the compiled trilogy.  I'll probably still do it but it's frustrating that it's so hard to actually buy something you want.  (I think to get an electronic copy it'd be easier to not buy it judging from the links that popped up when I searched for "Night Angel Trilogy eBook".)
     While I'm grumbling:  Borders, Amazon - you guys really need to get in app purchasing sorted out.  Being bumped out to safari is pretty annoying.  Borders one-ups amazon here by at least letting you browse the store from within the app.

OpenSolaris Once Again

Well, just for the heck of it I'm posting this from a computer running OpenSolaris - a Dell M90 laptop. It's certainly a lot more polished than the last time I tried a "community express" edition, everything pretty much worked out of the box - including wpa protected wifi with the wpi driver which wasn't working at all last time a tried (a long while back now.) Power management seems improved too, though I've not tried to suspend to disk or anything yet.
It's kind of neat to be able to tinker with Solaris this way at home. Tinkering is really all it is though I think, though maybe I'll find a real reason to run it instead of a linux distro. I do wish the pre-compiled package repository could be larger, though it's grown quite a lot over the last 6 months. I'm downloading the source for blender at the minute, hopefully it won't be _too_ much trouble to get that working.

Does anybody else get annoyed that while installing most versions of linux (that I've tried anyway, and solaris apparently!) you can't set the uid from the main installer? Even though as soon as it's up and running using any of the "add user" gui tools allows you to set the uid? I almost always wind up making a temporary user for the install, then adding my real user later on.
I have a few computers at home, and like to keep my uid common across them.

Anyways, I'm quite keen to have another tinker with OpenSolaris, see how zfs goes for snapshots and the like (though I can't really use zfs to it's full potential in a single disk laptop). Hopefully I can blender compiled and have a play with that as well, I'm curious if it runs any faster under OpenSolaris than linux.

Weekend Begins

So, it's a four day weekend for me and I'm trying to decide what to do. With the whole "economic crisis" thing, the American elections and the Melbourne cup you'd think there'd be plenty of things to catch my interest.
I however am currently just wrestling a baby who seems as eager to type on the keyboard as I am. Mental note, buy drool-proof keyboard.

I think I want to get back into doing some animation, probably using blender. It's been a while since I've done anything, and I've never used blender to create a real scene before. Done some stuff with 3ds years ago which I really enjoyed, I could see myself doing it full time. I'm not sure I could develop enough skill quickly enough to make a living out of it though.

I had two groups of trick-or-treaters come around for Halloween candy last night. That's double the number from last year, Halloween is getting bigger in Aus!
There was also a third group that went to my next door neighbors but didn't come to my house. Being judged unworthy of providing candy by trick-or-treaters is a surprisingly humiliating experience!