yman

I hate Optus

Jul 042011
 

For fucks sake. I’ve waited 45 mins for service. There were only 3 customers ahead of me, so I can only surmise they take their sweet fucking time abt shit.

Now I’m waiting again because when I finally saw a customer rep, they said they are not trained in stores to deal with it and I need to phone customer service.

Update:So it took me a total of 1hr+ to get it sorted. All I wanted was to change my plan to the cheapest amount which would cost me the least for the coming year factoring in any penalties I needed to pay. In the end, I had to basically look at the plans myself, workout the penalties and potential savings myself, and then tell them what plan to change to. So where is the “service” in customer service? They may as well have built an automated web based system to do this if waiting for 1hr for a human doesn’t really give me any extra information.

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Canberra training

Jun 272011
 

I was in Canberra last week, braving the cold weather (I think it got down to negatives at night with wind chill). It was all for 5 days of training, bonding and learning for my departure to Samoa.

I learnt a lot. Samoan culture is quite interesting and I am more excited than ever to go. Some fears were allayed, some other worries cropped up but overall I think I will manage. There are worse ways to spend a year than sunny Apia with its tropical charms and island life.

In between meeting my new assignment buddies, learning, going out, and writing a letter to myself to be opened in a year, there were some near evacuations.

Canberra fire

The hotel behind mine just caught on fire. There were camera men running down from various places trying to get footage, and prettier presenters walking slower down the to the scene to get themselves in front of the camera. It was actually quite exciting for a while there. Before I decided to take a nap. The Canberra weather has given me a cold.

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Legion and Hamachi

Jun 162011
 

It’s gotten to a point now that I am getting more and more tired and unmotivated. Even to post on this great Ultimate Sigh blog. For a while now I’ve been meaning to post something on my recent Mageia transition from Mandriva 2010.2. But I just can’t be bothered. Instead I attempted to get Legion TD going over a Hamachi network so I can LAN play with Ngai.

What started off as potentially a quick game of LAN at 8 didn’t see us playing until 1130, a full 3.5hours later that night. It all stemmed from the fact that I didn’t have legitimate keys to play on Battle.net, but still wanted to multiplayer with Ngai. After changing network configurations, turning off firewalls, Ngai reinstalling War 3, Frozen Throne and patches in his Windows partition, we still didn’t get it working. I had to get a cd key changer and use someone else’s keys to go on Bnet. But even then we couldn’t get into a game with each other until Ngai fiddled around with port forwarding. All this just to play 30minutes of the game before my wireless got cut for a while. It’s a sigh even though we were trying to be sigh free.

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Strata Sigh

Jun 082011
 

This sigh is an ultimate mega super sigh to the extreme. My strata is already a whopping $495.95 per quarter, for a 1 bedroom apartment in a complex with nothing except a lift as an amenity. Now I have a notice that it will be increased by another $400 to $470 per quarter!!

This increase in strata will take my quarterly fees up to $900 – $970 for the next 5 years. The reason for this massive hike (almost doubling) is that the building needs to undergo extensive defect remediation. The builder, who is dodge to the extreme, has basically declared bankruptcy and cannot fund the repairs. Despite, of course, the building still being new enough to fall under “builders’ warranty”. Pretty frustrated at the good money down the drain. It is time to sigh.

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Fucking Red Ring of DEATH!

Jun 012011
 

You know what it looks like:
RROD

My 3 (and a bit year old) Xbox360 just konked out all of a sudden without warning whilst playing Final Fantasy 13 (hey the game grows on you). One minute you are slaying some critters and the next it’s frozen and flashing those fucking 3 red lights at you. I’ve looked on the web for solutions. There’s power cycling, there’s the one with covering it in a towel. But they may resurrect it for a minute but as soon as you load something…BANG rrod.

Microsoft tech support basically says $100 please for repair as the 3 year warranty just rang out a few weeks ago on my console. How unlucky and coincidental is that? Is this precision engineering that NASA can be proud of? So tempted to get it repaired…but then again I am shipping off to sunny Samoa soon.

Calm blue ocean…calm blue ocean…

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End of an era indeed

May 312011
 

Scholes has just announced his retirement. Wow, this is another of the great players that I grew up watching. One more confirmation, if needed, that we are getting old.

It’s true that he hasn’t featured too much in Man Utd’s 19th league title, and indeed he was justly a mere late substitute in their loss against Barcelona in the Champions League final. But it’s still a bit sad to see another one of your childhood’s great players go.

I thought the Champions League final was won very convincingly by Barcelona. But I still can’t bring myself to like them too much. Sometimes their passing just bores me. Having said that, I would love Liverpool to be as good as them.

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Word Art

May 312011
 

There’s this automated word cloud generator that uses the frequency of words appearing in your document and generates a picture with the size of the words in proportion to how often the word was used.

So I decided to feed it the top posts of Ultimates Sigh’s RSS.
wordart

Looks like the most used word on the recent posts is “Pretty”, although “Sigh” does rank up there but not as much as you would think. It’s a pretty interesting way of quickly displaying what a document or page is talking about. 😛

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The migration is complete

May 292011
 

So I’ve officially moved onto Just Host for all my hosting services. No longer is Ultimate Sigh sitting on my PC. This should be good in terms of better uptime and availability.

One thing I have sacrificed though, is the discontinuation of the Sigh Chat service. Rest assured though, those chat logs have been saved for posterity. This was due mainly to the lack of interest and dare I say it, pretty unreliable service resulting from a combo of corporate firewalls and my own server being a bit precious.

In its place is the new and improved Sigh Forums now with fixed layout and colours for easy reading. And of course the much delayed Ultimate Sigh Email Addresses.

So if you want to get yourname@ultimatesigh.com addresses, head over to this forum topic and leave your preferred username. I’ll give you your personal address pronto. Of course alternatively, you can just leave your username preference as a comment.

For those already with an @ultimatesigh.com address, I’m sure you know by now to access it via google here: https://www.google.com/a/ultimatesigh.com.

A new Ultimate Sigh begins now!

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So the times they are a changing

May 232011
 

Over the coming few weeks, I’ll be migrating the Ultimate Sigh to a new host. Most likely Just Host. So during the migration there may be outages while I port all the files and setup over. Hopefully everything will transition nicely without too much messing around on my part.

Why am I moving the site off onto an external host? Well that’s because I will be moving to……………..
Samoa* for a year.

Sunny Samoa
*Well pending visa approval and pre-departure approval, but there’s an agreement in place now.

How come Samoa?

I hear people ask when I tell them about Samoa. Well it’s simple really. I figure this is pretty much the last chance in my life to do something a bit risky and adventurous. I still have time after I return to progress in my career, and I don’t really have any responsibilities or dependents right now. If I don’t do it now, I will probably just find a higher paying job and stay in Sydney, settle down, that type of thing. That’s not bad. Life is pretty cruisey here. But I know I will regret it if I don’t set off this one last time to experience something completely different and to go work and stay overseas for a while. So in short, if I don’t go overseas now for a career break type of thing, I never will.

Here’s to less sighs, and more awesomeness hence forth.

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CitiFAIL again

May 162011
 

I got up early today for yet another early morning meeting at 830. I wandered down to the station in the morning chill, with its icy wind stabbing into me. I went to the only, but thankfully clear, ticket window, hoping to finally be able to buy a ticket quickly. The station master’s attention is elsewhere. I make it known that I’m there, ready to pay for an increased in price weekly. He doesn’t even acknowledge me.  What could be so important? His attention was focused on a screen. At first I thought it must be his computer screen with important network info. Then I poke my head around further and I see that the PC is locked and the good master is intensely occupied with the tv next to the computer.  Yep I had to wait while he watched a particularly interesting breakfasts tv segment before being able to buy the ticket. Another excellent customer service experience from that most awesome of organizations, CitiRail.

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