After they had departed Tanzania via Kenya for Dubai her problems began, she’d used her credit card and somewhere one of the unscrupulous Africans had decided to initiate a fraudulent transaction against her credit card. Thankfully her bank detected the transaction was fraudulent as the amount looked suspicious and they locked down her card, but for her that meant upon arrival in Dubai her card was unavailable for use and she was entirely dependent upon Wendy for everything. It certainly makes you aware that if you’re travelling to Africa to use alternate cash sources, don’t use your credit cards as you just cannot trust that the places you might use your credit card are trustworthy. Eventually she got her credit card replaced and all was again well.

Yesterday spam went entirely low-tech, something I’ve never seen outside of an email before, and this could only have come from her African trip, one of those Nigerian style scams telling her they had $X million dollars for her.  This one offered her a 70-30% split and that she needed to fax them her email details etc. I think that’s a brilliant idea, let’s do that, she needs extra spam. I’ve never seen spam via snail mail before, other than the usual shit junk mail that I throw in the trash.

If you’re travelling to Africa avoid providing any contact details and consider taking cash or travellers cheques, avoid giving them the opportunity to target you like they did my friend.

We’ve still got months of summer left to go too, kill me now!! My world for all-year winter!

The Service then:

• Creates a temporary folder on the Desktop named “automator”
• Duplicates the images files to inside this folder and resizes to 1024 pixels
• Creates a new image and attaches those images
• Deletes the temporary files and folder

Hopefully other Mac OS X users will find my little Service useful. Download here. (.zip archive)

In December I finally got a reply from Virgin Australia’s customer support team apologising for the problems and agreeing to refund my expenses, just email us with the bank details and quote the reference number and attention to this person’s name. I did this immediately on December 8th, and got an auto reply from them to say they were busy and there may be a delay, fine, but I did expect they’d look at it. So, I have been checking my bank periodically for a deposit by them, a month later and still nothing in the account. Annoyed, I wrote again to the same person yesterday forwarding the original email and enquiring when I might receive my refund. It is just so annoying that I am still out of pocket several months after this all happened, and all because this airline had a turn around on its flight times that didn’t allow for anything going wrong, as did happen on this occasion (delays leaving LAX of 40+ minutes).

I have no intentions of ever flying this airline ever again. Rude staff, poor service, poor customer service, not worth the hassles. Wish I’d never gone with them in the first place and had stuck with Cathay Pacific despite their 2am departure time from Vancouver.

My initial thoughts were that perhaps it was just a fault of this particular mega menu, it wasn’t the only code structure out there, and as such I began looking at how others implemented their’s. Everywhere I turned it was the same, the menu remained open, you couldn’t click the top-level menu item you used to open the menu to again close it, nor could you click outside the menu and it was recognised and the menu closes. Some menus just stayed open when the top-level menu item was clicked, other sites when the top-level item was clicked it actually took you to the area’s web page. It’s disappointing that with the rise in touch-based devices surfing websites, and the increasing use of such mega menus, that touch-based devices seem to have been poorly tested.

My thoughts on how it might be tackled is that the top-level menu item is clickable to open/close sub-menu item. Upon open, create a click event for touch-based devices (using Modernizr tests) such that if you click outside the menu it triggers closing the sub-menu and deletes the trigger.

Who knows if it might work? Anyone else come up with a solution they’d care to share?

My father was also with me, he has Samsung’s Galaxy S2 mobile phone, also an Android device, and he was excited to see what the device was like, he got playing with it first and was getting confused straight await, this from someone who was already an Android user and used to how things work on his own device. To me that doesn’t bode well if existing Android users get confused, what if non-Android users come to purchase this device, what is their experience likely to be. So, I got on  and had a play.

The familiar animated backgrounds were there, Ainslie had the aquarium animated background running, I have to say it was rather pleasing to look at, and it adapted to whether you ran it in portrait or landscape mode, although it would be a nice tough if the fishes swam to adjust to the change of orientation, but that’s just a nicety not a necessity as happened to be the case. Launching of apps was the usual tough the icon and it launched, and closing was a matter of touching the little home icon on the corner of the screen, strangely no button. I found after using dad’s phone that it was very weird not having the familiar settings, home and back buttons in the bezel area to use, they were instead on the screen area. I launched the web browser to browse the web, the first thing I noticed here was the terrible scrolling here, it was awfully jerky here, something I came to notice in every application when dragging content, clearly the device must have been underpowered in either/both its cpu/gpu.

Another thing I found highly confusing was how I was to remove inactive programs from memory, on dad’s phone this is easily found, and they were easily removed, on the tablet I couldn’t easily find this and gave up. Settings on the device were found by holding my finger down over a clear area of the screen until a new window appeared, I have to assume that this is documented for users and in the box when they buy it as it is just not obvious to the uninitiated user, I much prefer the phone’s settings button, far nicer method. The user interface of the Tab 10.1 is just crap, the pseudo 3D interface that Android provides is a pathetic joke, I’ve never truly understood this need to have a 3D environment, but if you’re going to offer one, offer a decent attempt, not this.

I have to say I will be amazed if this device sells terribly well in its current form. I don’t know anything about how Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) release modifies things for tablets, and how it might affect this device, but it can but improve things from where they stand right now, the experience really is sub-par when compared to what I am used to on my iPad 2.

I was out at the Joondalup shops doing some Christmas shopping before I head to the eastern states on Thursday for the remainder of the year, after about two hours of shopping, catching up with a friend, and getting my hair cut I was just browsing DVDs when I took a step and a massive jolt of pain went up my back with each step I took with my left leg. The pain was quite intense, my eyes ran, fists clenched, I then thought I need to get out of here and back home irrespective of the pain, I can continue to shop like this.

I made it back to the car and sat there briefly, relieved to be off my feet, then drove home. Our boarder was preparing to move out but I couldn’t help, a muttered a brief hello and rushed to my room to lie down, this ended up being a bad move. After lying down spasms ran through my back as muscles relaxed and the pain levels just ebbed and flowed for half an hour. Every time I moved for an hour after that I’d be reminded not to. I wanted to farewell out boarder who was moving into her own house and made an effort to get out of bed, a massive jolt of pain ensued, I was stuck in bed, I couldn’t move for the muscles needed to do so were the ones affected. I lay there a while longer. I tried again and this time fought through the pain, by the time is done so I was pointless though, Jodie and Susanna (boarder) had pulled out of the garage and started to drive off.

Feeling better I went shopping again on Sunday for food and a few additional items I couldn’t complete the day before. All was going well until the last stop, food shopping. I had to bend a certain way for a loaf of bread, I wished I hadn’t done so for it brought on a whole new level of pain. I stood in the bread aisle of woolies for five minutes as I literally couldn’t move, each step with me left leg was excruciatingly painful, how tears didn’t run down my cheek I don’t know, for my eyes were definitely welled up and hellfire red. I held on to my trolley for dear life, with each jolt of pain I squeezed that handle so tight I thought it might break at times. Eventually I managed to move at a slow pace, can anyone say zimmerframe for this 40 year old lol!!

It’s really concerning that I have had these waves of pain, and that it has stopped me from walking. I hope I goes away or I’m going to be going to a physio real soon I think, at least this time unlike the last I shall be covered by HBF.

How is it that people who are faced with high levels of pain on a daily basis manage to cope? This is just brief for me and it sucks, for them not so. I feel for them!

It is interesting when you travel, you experience different cultures, new sights, and how differently they approach serving their customers. Here in Australia our wages are fixed in that you are paid a guaranteed hourly rate, you don’t have to bust your gut to make tips to pay those bills, so perhaps less incentive, but when I visited Canada recently where they do get tips, 15% of the bill being the standard gratuity, don’t you notice a whole new level of service, worlds apart from what we see here in Australia. The wait staff were attentive and appeared to give a damn about their job, about those they served, and I have to say sitting down in their establishments I felt like I mattered to them. Knowing that they relied on those tips I felt inclined to tip more generously too, especially as the quality of their service was so good.

I wonder whether introducing tipping into Australia, and changing salary structures for wait staff might see some become more service oriented, more like those I saw on my holiday. Until my trip I had only heard others at work say how poor our service levels were relative to overseas destinations, whilst I’d been to a number of European destinations I’d not truly noticed whilst vacationing there, perhaps they were different again to North America? Perhaps I just didn’t eat in the right places?

Another reason for this post, two days ago I emailed a local Apple reseller to enquire the cost of doubling the RAM in my MacBook Pro. Now this store isn’t the busiest on the planet let me tell you, but I seem to have hit its busiest period yet, for no response to my email. Either they don’t care for my custom, or they just don’t check their sales@ email address terribly often, maybe both. I question why it is businesses bother to have a) a website and b) an email address on that website if they have no intention of looking after either. Their website is shit, always has been, and perhaps they might like to open Apple mail (or other email client of preference) once in a while. Am half tempted to just order from OCZ and do the upgrade myself and sod them for their poor service.

I dream so often of moving to this country, I enjoyed my time there so much, it would be a dream come true to realise this. Increasingly I find Perth’s weather more and more unliveable, either it gets hotter by the year or my ability to cope with it just gets less, or both. The weather in Canada is far more attractive to me, far cooler winters, more milder summers, I just about died when the same tour guide told us Vancouver had ‘a couple of 32s’ last summer, it was spring back home and they had a 35 a few days after I flew out!

So, I live in this dream state whereby I actually win a sizeable chunk of lotto cash and Canada says come on over, live here for sure!! Hope someday one of my tickets turns it into reality, that would be an amazing day!

My only solution is to do a hard reset, holding the power button down for 5 seconds, start the laptop, but then it wants to instantly resume Windows Vista once more, upon which I get the same blackened screen once more, forcing me to hard reset again, the second time doing so actually gets me an option to delete the resume data and start a new boot to Windows Vista. I’ve given up and yesterday called for IT Services to come an look at the laptop, which they’re doing late Monday. I just can’t imaging that it’s a Windows problem, surely, it only got rebuilt in September for crying out loud, wondering whether it might be a possible fault in the laptop causing Windows to not sleep properly? Other possibility is that the original problem has carried forward from the roaming profiles we have (HATE!) and been reapplied.

Hopefully Monday they can take it away and get to the bottom of this. Might get them to delete roaming profiles for me, hopefully that will eliminate the problem.