Archive for the 'General' Category

It was our wedding anniversary last Monday, so I decided to book a couple of nights in a nice hotel in the Sydney CBD so we could have some time away from the house and my computer over the long weekend.

We stayed at the Westin Hotel on Martin Place – which was very nice (and rather expensive) … our room was great, and the price included a full buffet breakfast, one free in house movie and free hot chocolates delivered to our room for each night we stayed … so we really enjoyed ourselves.

On Sunday morning after a big breakfast we decided to go for a walk and visit some of the art galleries and museums – first wandering down to Circular Quay and stopping at the Museum of Contemporary Art for a bit, before walking around the Opera House and through the Botanic Gardens. We then headed to the Art Gallery of NSW and spent a couple of hours there looking at the paintings.

It was about 1pm or so I guess when we were walking through a quiet wing of the gallery that I noticed a spot on the wall where a painting was obviously supposed to be hanging. I laughed and commented to Leanne that perhaps someone stole it – but really I just figured that they had taken it off exhibition for restoration or cleaning or something. We thought nothing more of it until the news later this week!

ABC News on Wednesday evening - Speculation painting stolen from NSW art gallery:

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is refusing to confirm reports that a painting by a Dutch master has been stolen.

The gallery has organised a media conference for tomorrow morning and police will also be present.

… and then on Thursday morning – Dutch masterpiece snatched from NSW gallery:

A valuable 17th-century painting has been stolen from the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

A Cavalier (Self Portrait) by Dutch artist Frans van Mieris the Elder was reportedly stolen in the past week.

The gallery says a police investigation has begun into the theft.

Officers from The Rocks police station in central Sydney are leading the investigation and a press conference has been scheduled for later this morning.

The painting was donated to the Art Gallery of NSW in 1993 by philanthropist James Fairfax.

… followed later by another report – ‘Expert’ snatched masterpiece from NSW gallery:

Police say they suspect an expert thief was behind the heist of a $1.4 million 17th-century Dutch masterpiece from the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Sunday.

Sydney officers are leading an investigation into the theft of A Cavalier (Self Portrait) by Frans van Mieris the Elder.

“The artwork was expertly removed from the art gallery wall and we’re following all lines of inquiry to establish who is responsible for the theft,” Acting Superintendent Simon Hardman said.

He would not rule out the possibility that a gallery insider could have been involved in the theft.

There were no security cameras in the room where the painting was displayed.

Gallery director Edmund Capon says it is unlikely the painting could be sold.

“This picture is pretty much unsaleable,” Mr Capon said. “Firstly because it’s a small audience, a very specialised interest, and secondly because it’s so known.”

Philanthropist James Fairfax donated the painting to the gallery in 1993.

The police are saying they think it was stolen between 10am and 12:30pm … we were there sometime after 1pm … so it was freshly stolen when we saw it missing!!

… certainly adds a bit of mystery to our visit!! I’m just wondering when Rene Russo is coming to town to catch the bad guy (or seduce him !?).

Well, I woke up this Good Friday holiday morning thinking about enjoying the long weekend, only to have my entire weekend ruined by the stupidity of a bank.

When I logged in to my National Australia Bank Online Banking to check my accounts (as I do on a daily basis), I had a message waiting from the bank, which is not unusual – they are often notifying us of new features and changes and such. I also noticed that my bank account was showing that there were funds in the account, but zero funds available for withdrawal. Hmm.

I read the message – which turned out to be an automated notification that one of my payments (rent !!) had failed. “Payment rejected. Transactions are not allowed From This account. Please choose another account.”

Okay – so I called the number for technical support that they listed, and fortunately they were answering phones.

The guy on the phone was pleasant, but unhelpful – he could see that there had been a block put on the account, but couldn’t tell me why – he had no more information. He also couldn’t unblock it – it had apparently been done at a “branch” level – which he said was a bit unusual.

I asked if this meant that I would not be able to get money out of an ATM this weekend – he said, that was correct … no withdrawals allowed from that account … and I would need to speak to someone from my branch on Tuesday.

Of course, by this time I was pretty angry. For no obvious reason, someone had blocked access to my account the night before a four day long weekend (I could access it with no problems yesterday !!).

I asked to speak to someone who could help me – the guy on the phone told me there was nobody else … not even a supervisor, nobody else in the bank was working at all on a public holiday. I must admit I got pretty angry and pretty much yelled at him (I have about $100 in my wallet to survive a 4 day long weekend … which is possible, if we don’t actually go out and do any of the things we were planning on doing !!!). I did apologise to him later for raising my voice at him – I know it wasn’t his fault – I was upset at the stupidity of someone else in his company (he said he understood why I was upset).

He gave me a phone number to try tomorrow for Customer Resolutions to see if they could help.

While he was talking I remembered something and asked him if it looked like the reason for the restriction on the account was due to fraud. He had another look and said, actually, yes – it did look like that was the reason – but it was unusual, because only a single account had been blocked – usually they block access at the user level and technical support do that.

The reason I asked was because of another situation that happened earlier in the week.

I had logged in to the NAB internet banking for the company I run, InvestEd to transfer some money to my account as an expense reimbursement – we just use “pay anyone” to do this, rather than wasting time writing cheques and having to bank them.

It had been quite a while since I last did this, and didn’t realise that we now had SMS security enabled on the account – which means when you request a funds transfer from the account, it sends you an SMS message to the phone registered on the account with a code you type in to complete the transaction. Of course, it’s not my phone that was registered, it was my accountant and business partner (Nick) who set up that bank account!

So, I wasn’t able to complete the transfers, I just cancelled them after it asked for the SMS code. But I figured that Nick had probably received several SMS messages (this was 11:30pm Wednesday night!), so I sent him an email to let him know (didn’t want to call that late).

The next day, I got a rather irate phone call from Nick around lunchtime. He had spent most of the morning on the phone to the NAB fraud squad worried that someone was trying to hack into his bank account.

The problem was that the SMS message that had been sent contains no details about the transaction or the account it was requested from. Nick also uses NAB for his personal banking – so assumed they had come from his personal account. When he spoke to the NAB, he didn’t recognise the bank account details they were talking about (it wasn’t his personal account), and they refused to tell him anything about the account or where the funds were going to be transferred to. If they had just told him it was an account held in the name of InvestEd, or that the attempted funds transfer was to an account in the name of Hampel, then he would have worked it out instantly and told them what had happened.

It wasn’t until he got my email later in the day that he worked out what the story was … he called me and growled at me (out of frustration!) for making him think that someone was trying to access his personal account (which was not the case at all). Fair enough.

But what I think has happened is that the NAB still consider that fraud or attempted fraud has occurred – and so blocked my account to ensure that no further transfers can take place. Idiots.

Nick warned me that I should expect a call from the NAB’s fraud division, wanting an explanation – but no call came.

So the whole incident I think may be a result of poor communication (and anal privacy rules at the NAB), and laziness by the NAB … if they had called me, I would have told them straight away what had happened, they could confirm the story with Nick, and the whole mess would have been sorted out in less than 5 minutes.

Instead, they place a block on my account the night before a four day long weekend, without there being any chance of me following up and getting an explanation or a resolution before Tuesday – thus ruining my weekend. Guilty until proven innocent.

Thanks NAB – I am seriously considering closing all 5 bank accounts I have with you and moving my business elsewhere. They’d better apologise.

If nothing comes from this number I was given to call tomorrow, I will find someone to yell at on Tuesday … hopefully in person. Not happy at all.

Saturday Update

Customer Resolutions Team aren’t working the long weekend … I’m not going to be able to get any cash until Tuesday at the earliest. Guess where I’m going to be 9:30am Tuesday morning ?

Tuesday Update

I called NAB Internet Banking Support again this morning and got them to look into the problem. After about 15 minutes on hold – he came back saying the fraud department didn’t really know why the account had been blocked, and gave him permission to unblock the account *sigh*. I explained the full story (as described above) to him and he agreed that this may indeed be what has happened – and he said he would make a note on my account to hopefully prevent further action – in case someone was still investigating and decided to block it again. We’ll see. Apparently, you can have a third party bank account listed in your internet banking (with the permission of all account holders of course), so I’ll get that set up – will prevent this problem in the future.

Just gave three of my laptops back to IBM (actually, I transferred them to another employee, who will probably just dispose of them through our asset management system).

So for a few days I had 6 laptops, but now I’m down to three, soon to be 2.

Returned: ThinkPad 600X

This old clunker hasn’t been used in years – there’s a power-on password set from when someone else borrowed the machine for a while (who then forgot what it was !!), and I never got around to having the IT dept remove it). This was the first laptop I was issued by IBM – it kept me going for the first few months until we managed to get some decent machines.

Returned: ThinkPad T22

This machine was nice – it was my main machine for a couple of years, upgraded to 768MB RAM and it had a 14″ 1400×1050 screen – my first exposure to that resolution – which I have come to love over the years (a good balance between 1024×768, which is too low, and 1600×1200, which is too high for such a small screen size). After spending a couple of years connected to my Concept II rowing machine doing workout management, for the last 18 months or so, this machine was sitting under a shelving unit beside my desk acting as a server.

I installed the free VMware Server vitualisation product onto it, and built a VMware image to host my server based applications that control my backups, including site and database backups for all my websites, plus my EPG (Electronic Program Guide) information download for my digital set top box / PVR via IceTV. Has worked really well for this purpose. I will be sad to see this nice reliable machine go.

Returned: ThinkPad T43

This was my main machine for the last 2 years after having my T40 stolen while in New Zealand over the ANZAC Day long weekend in 2005 (I was there for work). I’ve not had a great run with this machine – first, it developed a noisy CPU fan which started to drive me nuts with the constant whine. It took me a while to get it fixed, because I new I’d be without my machine for a week or so while it was repaired – and I just couldn’t afford the downtime just then. Was such a relief when it was fixed. Next, I found it to struggle with the speed of the hard drive. Despite installing a new 80GB 5400 RPM drive, which should have been faster than the standard drive it came with, I found it took a long time to boot (much longer than other similar machines), and was often quite slow when under heavy load that required a lot of disk IO. I never did get to the bottom of that issue! The final straw was the screen problems that started developing in the last couple of weeks as described in a previous post. Very annoying. While I’ve enjoyed the 15″ 1400×1050 screen and 2GB of RAM, I’m not really that sad to see it go.

Not yet returned: ThinkPad T41

This has been my “official” work issued machine for the past 3 years … although I only used it for about 12 months before I got the T43 and relegated this T41 to “demo” duties. The 1024×768 screen was a step back from what I had in the T22 previously, but it was a nice fast machine and very light – which made it quite good for traveling with. Of course, I ended up travelling with 2 laptops most of the time, so any weight benefit from this T41 was really negated by the heavier T43. With 2GB of RAM it worked well – and I was quite happy with the design and reliability of this model – so much so that I bought one second had last week !! I’ll be handing this laptop back to IBM on Friday. Ironically, as this machine reaches 3 years old it will be replaced with a new standard-issue laptop, which is currently one of the lower powered T60 models – that would have been nice to have.

New server: ThinkPad T41

This is my personal replacement for the server duties the T22 was performing. To get it operational, all I had to do was install VMware server and map some network drives, and then just boot the VMware image off the NAS drive connected via the Gigabit ethernet connection. Easy as. I decided to buy the T41 secondhand after being impressed with my work issued machine.

New workstation: ThinkPad T60

This is my main machine now – the first laptop I’ve actually “owned” (ie paid for). I’ve had it for a week now, and am very happy so far – it’s fast, responsive, the keyboard is a pleasure to use (although I could have done without the new “Windows” keys – a waste of space in my opinion). Although I was very tempted to buy the new 15.4″ 1680×1050 widescreen version, it was just too expensive, so I went for the 15″ 1400×1050 screen that I know and love so much … and it’s great.

… so this is my recent history with ThinkPads … but of course the history goes a lot further back when you consider the IBM reseller / business partner I worked for back in Adelaide … I used to get new laptops every couple of months as my boss kept selling mine to customers !!! I went through pretty much the entire range of the ThinkPad 380 family over the course of 18 months … and I still vividly remember the first time I saw a ThinkPad 600 that one of the sales people managed to get for himself … what a thing of beauty it was back then ! Ahh – memories.

I was having a debate about whether we should add a blog feature to our website – which already has a discussion forum. The comment made to me was:

Maybe I don’t understand blogs … but what is the difference between what we’d say in blogs and what we say in forum posts that we initiate?

That’s a very good question, and indeed one that I have seen asked in many ways on many different blogs and forums on the net.

From a technical point of view, there are some obvious similarities, and some obvious differences, many blogs with a lot of comment traffic end up being a bit like a forum, and indeed, you could make a forum act like a blog without too much trouble too.

However, if you take a non-technical view at a higher level, the differences between blogs and forums is really pretty subtle, but somewhat profound at the same time.

From my perspective, the main point is a slight (or sometimes not so slight!) difference in emphasis between the two forms of conversation … and it largely comes down to who is in control.

A blog is where the conversation is about the blogger (or the blogger’s point of view), with any comments referring to the original blog post. Think of it like the blogger standing at the front of a large room giving a presentation and then answering questions – being in control.

A forum thread is more like a group conversation – no one in particular leads or “owns” the conversation, and it can go any which way. Think of it like a bunch of people sitting around at a restaurant talking about stuff over dinner.

You may get the same net result – but there is quite a bit of difference in how the conversation will go.

It comes down to what you are trying to achieve.

In many cases, a blog isn’t really necessary – a forum will do it just as well. But equally, there are times when a forum tends to lose a bit of the finesse of a blog – it’s much more of a blunt instrument.

The main strengths of a blog is that you can keep the main story (what the blogger writes) in one, easy to follow spot, whereas a forum will tend to see a conversation get lost in the noise – a forum is not really designed to provide a structure to a series of conversations initiated by the same person (or group of people).

Again, consider a seminar with a series of speakers (the blog), versus the discussion that happens over morning tea between seminar sessions (the forum).

While at first glance these differences may be too subtle for many people to appreciate, in practice, I find it makes a lot of difference to the end result and to the way you interact with your site’s community.

Just looking at one of the bits of paper that came with the docking station I bought for my new laptop from Lenovo.

I think it is supposed to be some form of notice or warning – but I couldn’t really work out what they were saying !

Docking Station for Lenovo ThinkPad Notebook PC is for use only.

mmm … I think they are trying to tell me to not try and use any other brand of notebook with this docking station.

AC Adapter of Lenovo ThinkPad Notebook PC or enclosed AC Adapter shall be used.

Yes, it shall ! But what what the point of telling me that ? Perhaps they were actually trying to tell me that I shouldn’t try and use another type of power adapter ?

When different AC Adapter is used, there is danger of emitting smoke, and an electric shock.

Ahh … now it makes more sense … I learned this in Electronic Engineering classes at uni … if you let the smoke out of a device, it generally doesn’t work any more. You need to keep the smoke in – that’s what makes it work !

WARNING
This product is not portable device. Don’t carry.

So now I’m stuck. How do I get it out of the box and onto my desk if I can’t carry it ? Perhaps I could slide it – they didn’t say I couldn’t slide it. Now to find something long enough to reach from the floor to my desk so I can slide it up there where it needs to go !

I’m sure the Chinese would get just as much fun out of us trying to write or draw sinographs !