This will be the last posting from Australia for quite a while I think. To say that I've been busy is a mild understatement. Luckily, I've had an amazing support crew hovering around me, attempting to maintain my sanity, and generally giving help when I've asked for it, and even more importantly, when I haven't. It's been very weird for the past few days, and your mind starts doing really strange things when it's so preoccupied. You become more forgetful and absent minded. I'm glad that I'm not planning on driving anywhere for the next few days, I think I'm a danger on the roads. I've got bigger things to worry about now though. What music should I be taking with me on the plane? I've got the shuffle to fill up, and the PDA should be able to handle some music to play too. Maybe I should just get some sleep instead.

I started out writing part of this post on my new Palm Tungsten E (Thanks guys!), but had to give up because my graffiti skills needed some improvement, and the writing up a rambling story using it would take hours. The actual device worked straight out of the box. You could pull apart the packaging and then tap a few buttons and be scribbling obscene pictures as if you had a sparkling clean whiteboard and a row of markers begging to be used. After a few hours charging, I was ready to tackle trying to integrate it with the rest of my gear. Unfortunately, I became less than impressed with how well the Palm and Apple software integrated. One of the big selling points for the Palm was that it could synchronise with iSync pretty seamlessly. However, if you follow the instructions down to the last letter, it just doesn't work. Since both these products were legitimately mine, I thought I'd use the support mechanisms of both these companies to try and get the problem solved, after I had tried to mine Google for an answer and received no joy. The support process between the two companies could do with some refinement. Google had at least confirmed that my problem wasn't isolated, and there were a few people who were suffering through these problems, yet none had a solution. Palm were the masters of form letters, often taking my emails, rewording them slightly, and then sending them back to me with a few form letters attached. Apple was unreachable for me. I didn't really have the option to call the US based Apple support, and I didn't have AppleCare to give me that service here. That said, Apple's support discussion boards have some knowledgeable people hanging around, and so you can often get some good information from there. So given that I had no way of really getting the companies who had promised to deliver a particular service to me to actually deliver that service (for the reason that my problems were too unlikely to occur again), I had to find other options to solve it. In the end, I had to dig into the actual applications themselves, and try to figure out what they were trying to do. It turns out that my problem occurred due to two specific bugs in the Apple and Palm software. I wrote up the techie solution in a message on the Apple boards. Sometimes I'm very glad I did the hard yards in Linux for all those years - it allows me to be able to get under the hood and tinker with problems which otherwise may never have been solved. Die-hard Mac users would be petrified by the thought of dropping into the terminal to change ownership on a bunch of files in a system directory. Then again, the software should have just worked - and it would have saved me a few hours of my time.

Next time you hear from me, I'll either be in an airport lounge or I'll be basking in the sun in Heidelberg.

Update - I put the pictures up from my party on the photos page. Go be click-happy.

I live in Sydney, but I will be living in Heidelberg. I used to live in London. Let's hope that Google will increase the resolution of their images a fair bit - since Heidelberg is a bit of a blurry mess at the moment.

Update - No. I didn't steal the link from Bhautik. Let's just say we think very similarly.

As counterintuitive as this may sound - the BBC rock. Not like Tea (Alternate link), or like sweets, but more along the lines of a really cool rock. Of course, if I wasn't panicking about leaving in a weeks time, I wouldn't have been so obtuse, and come out and just said I'm talking about the new series of Dr Who. It's just finished showing in the UK, and I decided that I should time (and country) shift the episodes so that I won't miss anything due to awkward airing dates between here and Germany. The show is - in the words of the good Doctor himself - "Fantastic" on two levels. Firstly the writing from Russel Davies hits ths mark most of the time with a good mix of drama and humour. The writing is quite far from the other sci-fi writing, where I was utterly ambivalent to the protagonist having his limbs chopped off and skin burnt off after he supposedly betrayed all the people he held near and dear to his now black heart. Let's hope the producers can keep attracting good writers to the show (I'm personally hoping for a stint by Joss Whedon). The second factor in favour of this show was that the actors aren't too bad. Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper are pretty convincing in their roles, although Eccleston seems to be most happy when he's having his dark doctor moments. The whole thing is backed up by dodgy BBC special effects budgets, but it makes for entirely compelling viewing. If you're not watching it yet on the ABC, you can hang around for the DVD. It'd be nice if someone set up a distribution network so that you could view episodes on demand.

In other news, a bit of vanity searching on "Hiren Joshi" (minus the quote marks) yields pretty good results (by my reckoning) on the big two search engines. Bhautik is also updating his site again, so you can go there now. I should really get back to trying to fit well over 25kg into my bag.

Right - the new shuffle is pretty nifty. I get to walk around wearing white earphones and looking like a complete prat - but I still give those nods of recognition to the cute (female before ANYONE says anything) joggers who run past with their white headphones, making me feel like part of some increasingly large club. One of the problems I have is that my head is ludicrously deformed. Not in the obvious way, but more in the fact that my ears just refuse to hold the earphones in there - they keep falling out. The foam thingies (technical term) on the earphones help out a bit by using friction to hold them in, but any slight tug on the cord, and those ear-plugs come flying out. I may have to resort to the trusty headphones soon.

One really annoying thing about the shuffle is that you must have your entire music library present on your syncing machine. If you don't, iTunes will happily remove all the songs on your shuffle which it thinks shouldn't belong there. Without asking. This, of course, won't do for me, as I keep my entire music library stored on a central server, and then connect to it when I'm at home. So it's really lucky that I came across this gem of a script - the iPod Shuffle database rebuilder. Basically what you do is drag and drop your files onto the shuffle via the finder, and then just run the database rebuilding script. It'll search for all files, and then create the iTunes playlists for them. Now here's where the really cool bit comes in. You can have two separate playlists - one for the shuffle mode and one for the straight play mode. So naturally, I create the "Albums" and "Shuffle" directories. You can add rules for which playlists you add files to, so I say that all albums are in regular mode, and anything in Shuffle is in shuffle mode. Now I can switch between listening to Albums and random music with a flick of a switch. If I can get symlinks working between files in the Albums directory and the Shuffle directory, I should be able to take songs from Albums, and add them to the shuffle mode playlists without taking up extra disk space. You can keep the script on your iPod, so that you can do this at any computer that you want to copy music off. Update - Symlinks are now working, hit the shuffle hacks page for the info.

But what about the touted ease of use and functionality of iTunes!? How about using that nifty Autofill feature with music you just happen to have lying around? I think these two methods are both compatible. Simply Autofill the shuffle with a bit of music, and then quit iTunes. Run the rebuild-db script, and your filled songs will magically appear on the shuffle.

I don't consider myself to be a grade A kook by any stretch of the imagination. I'd like to think that I have quite a firm grasp on reality, and for those occasions when I might lose it, I'm not taking long excursions to the forests to murder unsuspecting tourists because they might be aliens stealing my brain-waves. The fashionable apparel of choice for these fine alien fearing folks is the tinfoil hat, now synonymous with anyone who runs around with an irrational paranoia of aliens, the government, or fluffy rabbits. The point I'm trying to get across is that I don't believe someone is out to get me, or that a shadowy figure is watching over me a la Big Brother or Bad Wolf. I don't believe that stuff, but it doesn't mean that it isn't happening.

Anyone around me should know by now that I'm heading off to Germany in two weeks. It's not news any more. I've been spouting off about it for months now, and frankly, I think people are sick of it. I've made a few posts here about it too, so anyone following this should know about it. I've bought a ticket to Germany, so the travel agent should know about it. The people I bought lunch from across the road from my former work know about it. It's fairly common knowledge that I'm leaving amongst people I have some interaction with. One group of people I'm pretty sure I didn't talk to about leaving is St George Bank. I'm not in the habit of telling my bank exactly what I'm up to, because basically it's none of their damn business. So imagine my surprise when I get a card from them today. After the initial heart-warming feeling that I got knowing that my bank was thinking about me wore off, I started to check for hidden cameras. Why did they care I was going? Who else knew I was going? What are they going to do to me if I don't go? How did they know I was going? That last one really puzzled me. I paid for my trip using my credit card (from Westpac), and there is nothing I can think of that will link me, a trip, and St George together. Unless.. this might sound crazy - but maybe the banks share data about their customers, build up profiles of them, and use that to deliver "personalised" banking experiences to their customers. This kind of stuff must go on all the time. Has this happened to anyone else? I'd ring the bank, but I'm too busy crafting a hat out of tinfoil.

Update - Di pointed out her recent experiences with people watching from above, which seem a whole lot less sinister.

As of Friday - for the first time in about 7 years, I am now unemployed. Yay for me! I had a very nice farewell lunch at the Great Northern, and the kind people of PSL were gracious enough to indulge my musical obsession, and gave me an iPod shuffle for a leaving gift. I've been playing around with it today, figuring out neat ways to fill up the shuffle with the music I'm listening to. I didn't really think that the shuffle really matched my listening habits - but after thinking about it, and reviewing my Audioscrobbler history, I think I do actually listen to a few albums routinely - usually when they come out, and then eventually stop listening to them. So, for example, I've had Beck's Guero and Coldplay's X and Y playing a lot on repeat. Every now and again, I go back and re-listen to some of the older music I've got - especially if it's fantastic (or Radiohead). I also wanted to souvenir something from PSL, but I luckily didn't have to, as I got a special limited edition hand-crafted PSL mug for me to put my tea in. It's a little bit of Proteome history that I just had to have :).

I've now got a few weeks to do important things like selling bikes and signing up for income support from Centrelink (which you can apparently get if you're living away from home and studying). I'm also gearing up for the party next week, so I'll be making plenty of trips down to the bottleshop, stringing up lights, and collecting combustible materials. All very exciting!

Update - I couldn't resist, so I've added a bit of history about the mugs, extracted from an email I received detailing their history. The rest of the email is libelous so I haven't reproduced it.

What the hell? I seriously didn't expect that to pan out like it did. The weirdest thing is that the OS X on x86 technology is called Marklar - these guys have clearly been watching too much South Park. This makes my decision to buy a new laptop harder now. Do I wait a year (doing a ram and battery upgrade to keep me going for another year), or do I shell out for a shiny new PPC laptop, which may last me another two years - albeit at a slower clockspeed. Just to reiterate - Macs running on Pentiums. WTF? Oh yeah, we're all royally screwed now, since there won't be a single chip in the desktop machines which doesn't support DRM. Which means that content providers will feel safe and sound in restricting the fair use of media, since they know that the platform it's delivered on (Intel or AMD) will support it. This is how they will push the hardware upgrades to a DRM capable platform. Crappity crap crap crap.

So yesterday I had a go at making a post to this using the Dashblog Dashboard widget to try and make use of the wicked new features of Tiger. Being an optimistic bastard, I wrote up the entire post, and then sent it off without even making a copy in the clipboard just in case things went wrong. Of course, it went wrong, the post dropped off into the ether somewhere and I was left feeling very stupid. So let's try this again.

I went to see The Forgotten Army on Friday, with Fredrik and his Swedish crew. I hadn't heard of the band before, but they were playing in the Transit lounge at the Metro, so I figured I should go and check them out. Standing out side the Metro, I watched for a few minutes as someone set up what looked like a test pattern projected onto the outer wall of the George St. cinemas. Turns out it was just a promotion thing for X and Y, the new Coldplay album (It's not too bad - requiring a few more listens I think). The support acts, Blue Gin and Halogen (from Perth) weren't too bad, but not outstanding either. I think I probably spent more time wondering about the height of the lead singer from Blue Gin, the colour of the socks of the lead singer from Halogen, and the path this crazy guy was tracing as he paced back and forth across the stage.

By the time the main act came on, I wasn't really expecting too much. I was very wrong though. This plucky four-piece really impressed me - they were reminiscent of Muse and a touch of Radiohead. I was probably most impressed by the creative arrangements they used in their music - it wasn't simple guitar thrashing. I picked up their EP that evening, and have been listening to it pretty consistently for the past few days (apart from a big block of the Foo Fighters which I did yesterday). Go and find music by these guys, I'm sure you'll be impressed with them (if you're into Radiohead / Muse anyway).

While we're on the topic of quality entertainment - go see Crash, with the very excellent Don Cheadle in it. It's a tough movie to watch, but ultimately rewarding. Is LA really that violent? Do people actually live normal lives there?

I've just spent three hours working on an invite for my farewell party. The result isn't too shabby, and along the lines of the 04 party that I had. You can view the result of my photoshopping at my 05 leaving party page. And to all those bitching, yes, I'll send the invites out soon.