I am going to have a run run in a little while... I have not been for a run since before I went to the USA, so I doubt that I will be up to doing too much... A nice relaxing piece of exercise. But before I do that I want to get some work done.

On the weekend I was asked to get some code working by my canadian reseller... We have a sale when this code is running, so it is probably best to get this code running as soon as possible. So that is what I am about to do right now.

I have just been on the phone for a while going through some networking issues with a friend. He has just got ADSL running, and is now attempting to get his network set up in a sensible manner... With the functionality he wants...

Time for some art... Some rather expensive art. Like US$16,000. Personally I think this is a bit over-priced but I do so love it. You can have a look at the gallery page here.

There are some videos of the object here and here. One of the things that they developed a game of breakout with a mouse. And did it in 3D. This was really cute. I think there is about $200-250 in parts... Quite within the range of a cute demo project. Looks really cool. I am not sure that I could find anyone to pay $5000 for it, let alone A$20,000... But you never know. I will add this a to my todo list of cool projects. It really is so cool.

Anyway I have a lot of work to do... More later

Some XyXEL hints on their IVR system with the p2002, or Prestige 2002 series VoIP phone ATA device.

Firstly, calling #### calls the other extension. This is really cute... This is hidden in the manual. There is also an IVR, or Integrated Voice Response menu that is accessed by typing **** on the keypad of the phone. This brings up an Irish voice, asking you to enter options. The only one that seems to work is 5#, which reads the IP address of the device - a rather useful reature.

I have not worked out any other features yet. The binary file does not give things away. I did a search for **** and did not find anything. And there are no hidden hints in there that I could find either.

The SMH today has a story about an Australian pilot in Europe with RyanAir who landed a 737 too hard. He blamed marital problems. The reason why this is noteworthy is that RyanAir makes virginblue look like an expensive airline...

A few links this morning...

Firstly, victoria is adopting out Penguins for $75/year. You do not get to keep the cute little animals, but you do get a nice certificate... Great for Linux fans - since the penguin is the linux mascot/logo.

Thanks to BoingBoing there was a link to This blog that describes the pain that a Pixar animator went through to recover his stolen car when it was recovered by the police. And pain it was. Like the police ringing him at 3AM to say they had recovered the vehicle and towed it to a secure facility for him to collect - after paying the towing cost, and getting two police departments to say OK.

I am collecting information on LinkSys WRT54G units... The first site is internal photos. Rather useless really. OpenWRT has documentation on how to load Linux onto the units. And finally, here is documentation on how to load Asterisk onto the unit to run a PABX...

I just saw a millenium edition of "two point four children" which was totally hilarious. Stereotypical of all the millenium bug issues, and then all the hoarding which the wife stopped would have come in useful when the wifes sister-in-law caused the house to loose power, and heating on new years eve. It was really hilarious.

When I was in the USA, I heard a story about Brazil. The person I spoke to was invited to Brazil by a group, and they were concerned about the imigration requirements for US citizens visiting. The Brazilians have a law which basically requires quid pro quo for imigration. That is they subject all citizens from a country to what would be experienced by brazilians when they visit another country.

Therefore when people from the USA visit Brazil they experience conditions similar to what is experienced by Brazilians in the USA. Which really annoyed the Brazillians is that they needed to implement special rules. So whan a plane lands, they put all the USA citizens into a seperate line. And then once all the other people have been processed they are all finger printed and photographed. Then they go into another line for imigration.

The US Citizen commented that he just loved what the brazillians had done, but really thought that they should have used real ink for the finger prints...

I am so happy with myself. I have managed to get a VoIP service up and running. I ended up going with Faktotel since they worked with the ZyXEL hardware which I bought (which does not work with Engin).

The first issue that I had was that it was not able to get 'autentication'. I solved this problem by getting the DNS working. I had the device outside my firewall and I had told the firewall not to accept DNS requests on the external port.

Then I set things up again, with the firewall acting as a transparent gateway to SIP, and the modem not using any gateways or proxies. This seemed to work, but the dialtone was still wrong. I eventually found the issue... It was that I was plugged into the wrong port on the box. Plugging the phone into the box gave a dialtone. And dialing my mobile worked well.

Then I rang a friend and he was impressed with the quality. And So was I... It has taken too much effort to get this working, but I am really impressed by it...

Now I need a PABX to connect to it!!!

I got a new ADSL modem in the mail today - this was a bit overdue I think - My existing model is a bit old and I suspect on its last legs. Getting the new modem should have been simple, but there was a minor problem. ADSL would not connect, but I did not realise it. I saw lights flashing and I just thought things were working.

But things were not working. I could not work it out - the modem parameters were un-familiar, and I was having issues getting things working. Then I worked it out. I had entered my account number in... This would have been fine except for one thing - I entered the wrong email address with it. I have an email address to use that was assigned by my ISP. I have *NEVER* used this email. Never.

So when I was entering the details into the modem I entered my normal email address. And things would not work. It would find the ADSL, but not get any further. This was not good. But as soon as I entered the correct email things just worked. Perfect!

Just when you throught it was safe to come back to the Blog, here is more from Disneyland. This is from the Buzz Lightyear Astroblasters. At the end of the ride they allow you to email the photo to someone. Thanks to running IE7 I was unable to upload the photo here at the time. So here it is now.

Actually this is from exactly one week ago. The photo was taken automatically during the game, with low light which explains my poor complexion.

Last night while watching CSI:Miami I actually fell asleep again... This time I woke up a few minutes later, and pressed record on the VCR and went to bed. This was at 9pm, and I fell right to sleep. I woke up at 4AM and then went immediately back to sleep, waking finally at 6AM. This is a whole lot better a time to wake up, but it would be good to wake up a bit later too...

I dont think that my body has quite caught up with the time change, with reguard to meals. I am starting to feel quite hungry now - and this is not normally a thing that I would feel at breakfast time. Strange really.

So right now I have just finished watching CSI:Miami, and I am watching 'Without a Trace', which just happened to be recorded at the end of the tape...

This morning I have some quotes to right up - Quite a number of them actually... Definitely a few hours work in front of me there.

About 5pm this afternoon I had a real crash - I almost fell asleep at that time, and I would have if it had not been for a phone call from a potential client. This one asked for a quote, and as a concession told me that I would not be needing to come and visit him. Given that this job would be in an unstable part of the world this is a worthwhile concession.

I was literally on the couch when the phone came in, about to fall asleep. Tonight I will try to stay awake as late as possible so that I can get back to normal hours.

A friend of mine has just forwarded me photos of the JetBlue airbus that had an issue with the front wheel on takeoff in LA last week. It shows you how much damage was done to the front wheel when the plane landed. Actually I would have expected more damage to the front wheel on landing.

I am beginning to fade slightly... I mean I am starting to get a bit tired. I have been up since 4am and that is a bit early. I hate jet-lag... I really do. Thankfully I have found that if I do not have much cafiene when I fly then things are a lot better.

I have been working through my emails. I am now close to what I had before I went away. I now have something like under 100 messages unread. And that number is quickly going down. I just had a phone call from a client, and I needed to look in my send items to find an email. I really was rather shocked when I looked at the emails that I had sent today and realized how many I had sent. Most were really really short messages

I have had a query from a company in cameroon wanting hardware and software. To tell you the truth, I needed to look up where this country was. Turns out it is in central africa. I can assure you that I will not be visiting... It is probably fairly dangerous I would guess...

I am getting more used to being back by the hour, and realise how much I both miss being away, and love being home. I had an email from my Canadian reseller saying it took him 11 hours to get home. It took me about 17 hours in total including an hour from the hotel to the airport, two hours at LAX, 13 in the air, and an hour getting through customs and getting home. Not a bad effort really...

In a few minutes I am going to get my iPod out and upload the albums that I bought when I was in the USA. That should be fairly quick and painless I would guess... I did not but all that much music since the prices were not all that much better (and were generally worse) than here in Australia.

I am still catching up on things - emails and the such. I am down to 133 emails. I should be able to get that right down today I hope. I will see how I go getting stuff done this afternoon. And I am feeling a whole lot better - more energy and the flu is almost gone. Thankfully.

I had a comment from my blog emailed to me from an ex-pat Australian in a french speaking country... The text was "Its a funny thing but the word lingerie (even though it is obviously French) is not in common use here (in France) and most people do not even know the meaning. It was what a clothes maker was called in the old days. When my kids were young, their doctor was Dr. Lingerie which of course we thought was quite strange but even he did not know that we English use this to refer to women's underwear or night clothing. The modern French dictionary does include this meaning now."

I find this really strange, how the french do not use the word that is obviously french. I know that some words evolve, but I would not have included this as one of them.

Right now I am watching Spooks, recorded from the ABC. The strange thing is that the premise of the plot is an attack on the tube network in London. The interesting thing is that they picked most of the locations from the tube bombings earlier this year.

So what am I doing writingt in a Blog at 4:30AM? Well, I woke up at 4AM and I did not feel like going back to sleep. I am jet-lagged... That is I am feeling fine, but my sleep patterns are still not right. During The Bill last night I actually fell asleep. I cannot remember what happened in the show. I went to bed at 10pm, which is probably a bit early if you want to get up later than 4am (after having a decent sleep during the day)

I noted a week or two back about the iPod Nano. Now comes news that the iPod NANO screen is really really easy to scratch. So mutch so that it is really useless for album art. This is because the screen is so small and so high a resolution - which means that even small scratches cause big issues.

I am feeling a whole lot better today - with this flu almost gone away. I hope to actually get caught up on a lot of work today... I hope to be really productive today with the amount of wokr I can get done.... More soon

This afternoon has generally been fairly quiet - just recovering from the flight and also from the flu. I think it is mostly the flu rather than anything else. I would love to know exactly where I got it but I do not think it will be that easy - I cannot remember seeing anyone with a cold.

Saturdays talk did go well. It was an Introduction to APRS. There were probably 25 people in the room, and it was almost exclusively peoplw who were not at the talk the previous day. This meant that I could wow them all with the Google Earth software and give them some ideas on where the technology was going. The first thing I did was ask for a street address for someone who lived near a hill.

When I did this I really amazed all the people there - The person who owned the house was amazed since it showed his antenna on his house. This showed the group the power of what they were seeing. All in all the talk went very well - lasting about 90 minutes. And after that I got more and more questions. And business cards shoved at me. Basically this turned into a good marketing exercise for me...

I have just woken up after a nice long afternoon sleep. I really needed it I can tell you, and I was only woken up with a phonecall from a client.

Lets see... Time to describe more of the conference. One of the talks was on 'Passive Radar'. GNUradio programmer Eric Bloom is working on a way to track aircraft using multiple recievers using TV transmitters and the like to do the tracking. The cool bit about this project is that it should be able to pick up the stealth bomber and stealth figher. Eric actually lives near area 51, giving a large number of aircraft to track.

Matt Ettus, also from the GNUradio project described his USRP board which allows you to cheaply digitize the radio spectrum and get it into the computer for the use of GNUradio. This hardware can be used to create a transmitter and receiver. It was cute seing one of these boards transmitting about 16 different CB type voice channels, and the other board receiving all 16 at once.

The other interesting thing is that this hardware also allows you to receive HDTV signals in the USA, and totally ignore the 'Broadcast Flag' that might say that a HDTV signal cannot be recorded or something...

Anyway I will describe more of the conference later...

I have just been out doing some cultural adjustments - going down to K-Mart and the Post Office and the like, and I must say it is really nice to be back. Things are just so familiar in Australia, and life is so much tamer and more genteel.

Right now though I am a bit exhausted after the plane trip. Some of this is JetLag, and some is the after effects of the flu.I am planning to watch some of the TV shows recorded during the time when I was away.

I dropped in on the Travel Agency, and they thanked me for my email updates. What I did for my friends was to grab all my Blog entries together every day to two and email them out. All the people in the agency really loved to read these updates...

Not sure what else there is to say right now. Except more later.

The previous entry was actually posted a few minutes back. I forgot to press the publish button before I went back to sleep...

I just got an email from one of the other people at the conference... "You made out better then I did..I had to drive the last leg from Chicago to Dayton because my first flight was delayed. Got in about 4:30 AM. Probably was a good thing that I WAS sort of on CA time. Still waiting for my bag to catch up.". Ouch.

So I was not the last one to get home after the conference - that is good to know.

I tried to use my cordless a few minutes back and there was no dialtone. I could not work out what went wrong. I eventually worked out that the headset software had crashed, and needed the battery removed and replaced. Now it works - or at least the dialtone now works.

I have a slight cough at the moment - I am still recovering from the plane air conditioning and everything else. I hate flying... But it is a whole lot better than driving or going by sea.

One of the first things on the agenda this morning is to go down the street and get culturally acclimatised... Just seeing Australian shops will be good. I have just taken US$148 from my wallet... I suspect the local shops will not accept this money

It is now an hour later... 3:44AM, and I have not been back to sleep.. So the laptop gets turned off now, and my in-box is down to only 170 unread messages... or messages that have been read but need to be actioned...

Good night... My bed is calling me...

It is now 2:51AM Sydney time, or 9:51AM LA time. I am now home, and I am a bit jet-lagged... And in case you were wondering, yes, I have had some sleeep.

The shuttle to LAX was good. It was on time, and fast. I would recommend red vans again. I did leave from terminal 4 at LAX - and thanks to Qantas Club I got priority baggage. Also I got priority security screening which actually did not save much time. Then inside I went to the American lounge, and watched some simpsons on DVD until the flight.

On the flight I was sitting in 35H, which was the first economy seat on the aisle on the right ride. This did mean that the ride was not too bumpy, and made for a quick exit when we finally arrived in Sydney. coming over we did a southerly detour out of LA for some reason for a few hundred miles, and then just north of Fiji did a diversion due south and then due west presumably to miss turbulance.

I purchased a travel pillow in Target in LA, and I found it great for the flight. I found it fantastic - I would just snooze whenever I wanted. The flight timings worked well... We landed about 8:15. I rang my mother to get a lift home soon after that and she was at the international departures upstairs to pick me up when I got there.

Getting through customs and imigration was east. Imigration was a bit slow, but my bags came out about 2-3 minutes after I got through. Then customs needed to inspect something that I had purchased and then got a lift home. All very quick and painless.

Now all I need to do is go through emails and catch up on work.

I am about to check out of the hotel... And then get the shuttle to the airport... See you on the flipside

I have just had a really really interesting lunch - with a person from MAF. They are the Missionary Aviation Fellowship, and have interesting requirements for communications and tracking. Most of lunch was speaking about how satellite terminals are changing their world totally.

Some missionary stations which used to need six months to get letters each way to the rest of the world now have email with a four hour turn-around. Others are getting satellite terminals which allow very cheap live voice calls over the internet. I was told that missionaries actually cried when they got their first email message reply since they had been out of touch for so long.

So much is being done to improve communications around the world. I also heard that 'Last Mile solutions' are providing 'store and forward' email access by placing a 'Web Cafe' in a remote village. This might even be pedal power. But the village will not have any communications, but might have a daily truck to pick up crops, or a bus. So what Last Mile does is place a device on the bus or truck that exchanges email with WiFi whenever it comes into range.

This creates a 'network' that is similar to the old dialup communications. Then when the bus comes into internet access it sends and receives all the email.

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The Dumb and Dumber criminals in the USA have been sent to gaol. They are now spending about four years in the clink.

Not much to say... I have had a touch of the flu, but thankfully that is getting better thanks to vitiman c, lots of liquid and lozengers. I have another talk at 10:30 and I should be right for that - assuming that I have time to read through the presentation I did 12 months back and edit it where appropriate.

I heard a great quote from a T-Shirt a friend of mine was given for organising a linkup to talk to the International Space Station. The shirt read "I went to school today, and all I got to do was talk to an astronaut"

I will leave it there.... More later

Right now I have just given my talk. It went fairly well I think... Some of the presentation slides were out of order. But apart from that things were good... People were blown away when I entered addresses into Google Earth, and have this send GoogleEarth to that location.

I got some intelligent questions from the audience. And people were asking about additional uses for the Google Earth application which is good. They were asking the correct questions.

What did interest people was the New Orleans photos in googleearth, particularly with another hurricane coming down on the USA within the next day. Talking to people at lunch it seems that the entire US airport system is screwed up thanks to closure of important airports in preparation for the coming storm. Some of the Texas airports are hubs and they have been closed at the moment with the storm coming.

I heard from my friend in CNN... he has been sent down to the Texas and Louisiana coast to provide techical assistance for the CNN coverage of the RITA huricane.

I have just got back from dinner... A group of us went to the local hotdog joint for dinner... Not what I would normally call a nutritious dinner, but it was interesting to have something different. I cannot see why people would want to add gerkin and mustard to a perfectly good hotdog. Still, the food was not bad, and at US$6 it was cheap. Not good for everyday though.

In the afternoon there were a group of people in the atrium congregating for pre-dinner drinks. I tried to work on my presentation, but they were far too interested in the GoogleEarth software, and I ended up just demoing the software, showing some of the things that it is capable of.

As you might guess, I am not quite finished my presentation... I am about to start finishing it - and will complete that job as soon as CSI finishes [and it is has just finished]

Oh, before the dinner drinks I had a SKYPE call and it worked really well... Even with me on hands free. Video conference even worked well too... I was very impressed....

Right now I have almost finished the board meeting at the hotel here in Santa Ana. The feeling here in the USA is rather interesting at the moment... With the hurricane coming to Texas. There are so many people here from that part of the world, and who need to come via Texas. This means that some people cannot get here, and others are rather nervous about if their house will be there when I get home.

And the price of fuel is causing the entire country to think about travel too, reducing confidence in the economy. I can see the cost of living increasing because of the increase in fuel costs.

I have booked my sunday travel. From here to LAX airport. This will be under US$40... I used www.redvans.com for the transfer, and I am hoping that this will work well.

It is great to meet all the people again, and bounce ideas off different people. Professionally it is becoming really great...

It is now 7AM on Thursday morning... I am about to meet with a client for breakfast, and then I have a board meeting.

This hotel is really nice. They have a happy hour with some food to nibble on, and free drinks in the afternoon which was nice. I was down there doing some work on wireless, and someone turned the TV on. Turned out to be that aircraft that had the problem here in LA with the nosewheel. It was on TV live for about an hour... And happy hour was underway when it landed so there were huge cheers when it went well...

My hotel room has a louge area which is really nice, with a door seperating it from the bedroom area. I like it. This morning they provided the LA Times and USA Today papers to my door. Since I do not read them I should let the front desk know so that I can save the money on my bill [Legally the papers are not free since if they were they would not count against circulation figures... And that is how they compete with each other - publicity]

Last night I watched a new Jerry Brockheimer show called E-Ring about the pentagon... This is from the same person who did CSI, and it seems not bad.

Darryl

I am now in the Hotel in Santa Ana... Checked in and ready to go. Thanks to a local ham I got a lift here, and the hotel seems really nice. I ended up with a suite which overlooks an internal courtyard. I am on the 6th floor, and the room even has a little 'bar'.

The weather today wat disney was so much better... Compare these photos from yesterday and today.



To start with the Space Mountain Roller Coaster was closed today... Some electrical problems yesterday... So I spent a couple of rides on Buzz Lightyear's AstroBlasters. I did far better than I had in the past, with over 100,000 points both goes. I will see if I can get the photos of this a little later...

I did go on Flash Mountain this morning too... And got at the front of one of the boats... This was fun, although I was a bit scared when I could see how steep the final drop was.



I also did some shopping today... But mostly I relaxed a bit, and then got a lift to the hotel here. I did go to frys... and it was amazing... The size of K-Mart... I picked some toys up for future projeccts... I wish I had something like that back tom... Anyway more later...

I slept well last night... This was good. I looked at my ticket last night. Turns out I arrive home at 8:30PM on monday which is a couple of hours earlier than I thought. This is good.

That is unless the flight is delayed. That might happen... There is a hurricane just east of Hawaii, right on the normal flight path which we will have to go around and over. Might make things a bit bumpy.

Disney this morning... Some rides and I have some shopping to do there before checking out... Then Fry's and the conference... I am really looking forward to that...

There is a cute T-Shirt for sale at Disneyland.... It says

"I like my boyfriend, but I *LOVE* Mickey"

I just think that this slogan is so cute...

Right now I am sitting in the bar of the hotel with a mineral water on the table, listening to Dido on my iPod. I picked up the Dido 'Live at the Brixton Academy' CD/DVD at the airport, and I am loving it. This is a lice CD, but the audio quality is actually fairly good... I am impressed...

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I have almost finished my presentation... I need to work out a few demo's and that will be that.. So I should have it finished sometime tomorrow. Probably in the afternoon. In the morning I am going to disneyland for a couple of hours and then going to Fry's and then my next hotel...

For all those who are thinking of jumping on a plane and visiting southern california and Disneyland today, can I suggest you do not make the 13 hour plane journey, and wait a few days. The rain is horrible, and many rides are not running.

This is the Crystal Cathederal last night...


I visited the Californian Adventure today, and went on Souring over California once more. They have this water mist coming out from under a jet engine outside the ride, and it was so humid the mist was just staying in the air.

The first ride I went on today was The Tower of Terror in the 'Hollywood' area.




The premise of this ride is that you are in a lift in a haunted building - The full name of the ride is the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. I was in the first group to ride in this ride today which was sort of cute. I went back a second time, and was going to go a third time, but the ride was closed with the weather.

The following streetsign is in the Hollywood part of the park. As far as I knew Hollywood and Sunset were actually paralell roads. Mostly that is. 6300 Hollywood Blvd is the famous 'Hollywood and Vine' intersection. I am not sure what is at 8700 Sunset, but it is a few miles west of Hollywood central business district.



After that I went on Soaring over california again. Not as much fun as the first time but still amazing...

Then Grizzly River again...

Actually I went on it twice... One of these times there was a woman on the ride from Melbourne who got totally drenched... Poor thing... She was sopping wet... I was glad it was not me...

And hey, look... This is me with Minnie Mouse...


About this time it started raining... No, really pouring... And I decided to escape, at least for a little while...


Oh, I almost forgot. Disney today deddicated their 2005 'Disney Legends' who have done special things in the Disney world. This year they had the ceremony (which I some of) in Disneyland rather than DisneyWorld because of the 50th anniversary of the park...

A few things I forgot last night... Firstly when I visited Target yesteday I found signs for the major departments. These signs were in English and I assume Spanish. The only issue is that they were not all in English, which made one of the signs ridiculous.

You see, one of the signs was 'Lingerie', with a spanish translation provided. As far as I can tell the spanish version was something like 'intimate clothing'. Which is fine, except that Lingerie is not English, but french, and therefore the translation should have been provided for the english version too :-)

I just saw in the Sydney Morning Herald that a woman from Victoria has joined the High Court. This was very obvious since the High Court had no women on it, and was almost exclusively a NSW club. For the last few years you have not been able to join the court if you are from NSW, and qualified people from NSW have been placed elsewhere.

This morning I will be visiting 'Disneys Californian Adventure' again. I have done most of the rides anyway, but will do some more... and ride some again...

Breakfast this morning was IHOP, or International House Of Pancakes. I really was dissapointed. The pancakes did not taste spectacular, the butter was small, and the pancakes were not all that hot. I expected much better - They were filling at least.

Dinner tonight was good - I had a steak sandwhich which was really nice. This was really steak and salad with the steak on top of two pieces of bread. It did taste really nice, and was filling.

Right now I am looking south down Harbour Blvd waiting for the next bit of the electrical storm... There have been some spectacular flashes, but none really close to the hotel... I think the storm might have finished now...

I just took the following photo out my hotel room window. At the bottom of the rainbow the two objects to the right are the Crystal Cathedral and its clock tower. The buildings to the left are the downtown area where I was at on Sunday.


I love this phone... It is in ToonTown, inside Disneyland.

These were for sale in ToonTown - Slippers and Gloves...




As I was leaving Disneyland there was another film shoot being done.


I tried to have a third go on Space Mountain, but the problem was that it was broken down when I went back. This ride is really cool - I love it. In the dark you also seem to go much faster than you actually do. This is the 2nd fastest ride in Disneyland itself - the fastest being the final part of the logs in Splash Mountian. [Sorry for the delay - I needed to look and see what it was called...]

I have not been back to the park this afternoon - I was a bit tired so had a nap for about an hour, and then I walked up to Target again and picked some things up. I bought myself a really nice travel pillow for the journey home. Very comfortable.

Now I am going to go down and get some dinner... I then need to work on my presentations for the conference. I have spoken to my friend who is going to give me the lift to the conference - he is going to take me to frys too... It is the coolest technology shop on the planet...

I have just got back from Disney - It is now about 3pm, and I have been there since about 9am, so that is a good fair time to be there... Right now I need a rest. Some jetlag, and some sheer work combined together I think.

I got in at 9AM with an early entry pass... That was a good thing since it let me do some rides before anyone else got in. Buzz Lightyear was an interesting one - you sit on a seat going round with a little laser gun shooting at targets trying to get a great score. Takes practice... and there are lots of people also trying to hit the same targets which makes the electronics interesting. I suspect that each of the buggies is set up with a pulse position modulation on the laser diode, so that many guns can hit the same target.

They were doing a film shoot this morning near the Cinderalla Castle.


I also went on Splash Mountain today which was fun as normal. It is the classic log ride. I also went on Big Thunder Mountain which is a small rollercoaster. And I did the Matterhorn again.

Probably the best of them all was Space Mountain. They have re-done the coasters so that they now have synchronised movies in every car - and this really makes the effect amazing. For those who have not been, Space Mountain is a fast tight roller coaster, in the dark with star effects to make things really amazing....

I did the Indiana Jones ride which was fun. The horrible thing about that ride is the walk to get to it... The walk is most of the delay.

I also did 'Its a Small World', which is a relaxing ride.


This is two Platypus singing in the ride.


There are some unique things on sale at Disney. There are things like Bride Minnie Mouses, Groom Mickey Mouses, and these board games - Haunten Mansion Cluedo, and Pirates of the Carribean Game of Life.


More next entry...

I had some issues this morning with the outgoing eMail proxy... So I have needed to install some software on my Unix box at home and that has fixed things for the moment at least. I will have to see how things go, and fix things properly when I get home. I will not go into the fix for security reasons here...

I slept VERY well last night - I think I went to bed at about 9:30PM and woke up a bit before 7am... I woke a few times but generally I slept well...

Yesterday at Target I saw a childs DVD player for a car... One that uses C or D batteries with it, and contains a very small LCD, branded with Minnie Mouse for US$70. This is under A$100... A good price point. I almost got one...

The restraunt next to the hotel is now an IHOP (Pancakes)... Bit of a dissapointment really, but I have not eaten there yet. I might go there for breakfast. I had better do that soon, and then get to Disneyland...

OK.. Where did I get up to. I have just been down to DisneyLand and the Californian Adventure. It was good. The first place I went to was DisneyLand.

I have not been on the cups yet... That will be tomorrows journey.


The first ride I went onto was The Matterhorn Bobsleds. This was good - basically a little roller coaster. I had never been on this before since it was always closed.




Following the bobsleds and walking around I went to the californian adventure.

I first went on Souring Over California which is sort of an up-close IMAX where you are on a seat that moves. This makes it close to being in a plane in terms of the feeling. This was fantastic. Following this I went on Grizzly River Ride... This is one of those huge tube rides where you get wet. Really fun.



Then I went on the Maliboomer... Where you sit on a seat and get sent up a pole quickly and then bounce down.

Right now it is 9AM sydney time, or 4pm local time. I am about to wander down to Disneyland, but I will let you know what else I have been up to... I have just woken up from about 1.5 hours sleep.

When my hotel room was not available, I walked down to Target which was about a mile away in the distance and had a look. Fairly boring actually. Then I to The Block at Orange, walking past the Crystal Cathedral. This was just over another mile away. The Block was basically reminiscent of somewhere like fox studios or Waringah Mall where all the shops are outside - suiting the californian climate. This was cool - although it was slightly strange seeing Flight Centre there - offering US$800 flights to Sydney. And also free iPod Shuffle's with 5 day holidays to Hawaii. The Borders there was much of a dissapointment really... They are better in Sydney.

Then I waled back to the hotel - another two miles and the room was still not ready - so I then wandered down to downtown disney for some time just looking before heading back and finally checking in... You all know the rest...

Right now I am off to Disneyland proper... Ciao

It is now about 2:30 in the afternoon here in Sunny California. I am exhausted, but right now I have the funny sensation that the world is moving. .I think that this is mostly that I am over tired, and that I need a rest. Ok, where shall I start.

After the last post in Sydney, I checked in. This was quick, and I got 37D which is close to the front of the economy section. For once I got the left side of the plane. Airlines like to put me on the right side normally for some reason. Imigration in Sydney was super fast. There was an imigration officer waiting for me as I walked in. Then to the Qantas Club. This was good - I spent the spare time watching four episodes of the simpsons on DVD. No useful duty free...

The flight was not what I would call packed. I had a seet next to me that was free which gave me some extra room which was good. During the flight I think I got about two hours of sleep. It was good having the iPod so I could relax even if I did not sleep.

I watched the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy first. Argh. The movie was not bad, but it really lacked storyline. It sort of just ended.. .More like the end of an act rather than the end of the movie. And I saw Mr and Mrs Smith - which is a spy movie. It was a lot better, and used marriage counciling as a plot device... Rather an interesting concept, and a movie I would like to see on a bigger screen.

The flight was more turbulant than normal. Not sure what was going on there. Normally I find that flights are normally very calm except the equation. In this case we had bits of turbulance all the way.

When we arrived at LAX, we stopped at terminal 4 rather than the international terminal since there is a lot of remodelling being done. Getting through imigration took me about 10 minutes, but probably took the slower people off the plane another 20 minutes or so. My bags were out when I got through imigration - partially since they had been incorrectly marked as 'Priority' which technically Qantas Club members are not entitled to. Walked outside and waited about 3-4 minutes for the shuttle, and I was at the hotel about an hour after de-planing...

Anyway I will leave this entry there. More later as always

I am in the USA... And finally in the hotel... I will post more in a few minutes...

OK - Right now I am in the Food Court at the International Terminal. The train trip here was quick - with the train actually arriving on time, and getting me here on time too. Turned out to be one of the millenium trains which is really nice - new and air conditioned so that was a real bonus too. I love trains, when they run on time... I really do. I just wish the airport line stations were not so darn expensive...

So why am I sitting here in the food court and not in the Qantas Club... Well, I got to the airport early, and it seems that Qantas will not let me check in more than 3 hours ahead. Not sure why that is but I am sure that there is a logical reason for it. Anyway I am just waiting until the 10:30 timesloit to check in, and then go to the lounge area. The checkin person let me know that I have got an Aisle seat, which is what I want... It had already been allocated to me before I got to the airport. This is good.

It is almost the golden time so I guess I had better finish this entry here, and prepare to finally check in and get the boarding pass... See you all in LA!

I know this is an early update, but I woke up and I could not get back to sleep.

Yesterday was busy... But fruitful. My client came around and ware really really happy. He got exactly what he wanted, and a lot lot more. He is arranging a few meetings when I get back with some clients, since he now has a better idea of some of the technology that I am working on, both for him and for other clients. He was just blown away with everything. I am sure that I could have trippled the bill and he would still have been smiling as he drove away.

I spoke to Richard on SKYPE last night for about 40 minutes... He was in Japan, and telling me about all the issues being in a country where no-one knows how to speak english and your cellphone does not even work... Apparently there are people everywhere over there... Just everywhere. His view of Rome's scooter riders is like mine... They must have a short life expectancy given what they do on the roads. Thankfully his training course has been cancelled this week meaning that he can get over any jetlag quickly.

Anyway I am going to grab some food, and finish getting ready - after watching the end of something I recorded last night... I plan to add another update here sometime before 1PM, but then there will be nothing until probably 4 or 5AM...

I will probably

On the really cool side, this morning I was emailed a 6 mByte word document. Why was it so big? Dunno. Anyway it was from my friend Bill Kovacs in LA. The story was about how REZN8, a company that I have done work for in the past had done a cool demo for the Microsoft PDC conference on WinFX. Bassically Bill and friends did a demo for the new version of windows that includes a NetFlix demo. Ultra-cool.

There is some information available here. Because of the size, I will not include the email from Bill here...

When I am in the states, I am thinking of getting a couple of LinkSys WRT54G wireless access gateways if they are cheap. Why? Well, to install a PABX onto. More information is here

According to Nature, GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps have been used to find roman-era villa in Italy. A computer programmer looking at his home town first stumbled on an ancient water course, and then on the rectangular outlines of the ancient villa. There are now some moves to excavate the villa to see what has been left behind.

Anyway, back to work for me. I have some things to finish off before my client gets here about 2pm...

I need to vote in the election this morning... It is just a bi-election when Craig Knowles resigned from State Parliment. Simple task. But this is the third election in the last 12 months for me. I have had a federal election and two bi-elections.

The big taks for today is to write some documentation for a client, including a nice invoice, and then hand the hardware and software over. Then I need to pack. Having been overseas so many times I will find it quick to pack. Not much to do really. I have a fairly good idea what I will need to take with me, and just need to grab it all.

Microsoft have just shown off software that allows them to remove something from a photo... Such as a person. Interesting example of technology. A few news reports are indicating that Westpac is looking at introducing fingerprint security when accessing Internet Banking since credit card fraud is now costing $100m per year. Could the fraud be because they have resisted smart card technologies for credit cards, such as being used in many other parts of the world?

On the Linux front, ZDNet has reported that the attempt to trademark the word LINUX in Australia has failed because it would make it impossible for other businesses to operate without using the trademarked word. Interesting read.

And the SMH is reporting that AEROSONDE has a remote control plane that will be flying into Huricane Orphelia in the USA and providing live pictures to one of the TV networks...

I just found a strange feature of most mobiles - a Message Validity setting. This is the time an SMS message will try to be sent before it is killed off if it is not delivered. Some phones you can set this for something like 5 minutes as a minimum. General you would set this for something like a week. My phone had this set for 24 hours which is probably a bit short. If the phone it is being sent to is switched off for 24 hours it will never get through. I never knew this until today.

I have just done some searching, and the paramaters of note are VP and TP. TP is the retry time, and VP is the maximum retry times. The values for VP with the SonyEricsson modem are 0-255. With an algorithm meaning from 5 minutes to 64 weeks.... Rather Interesting

After a few hassles I am getting stuff ready for clients. And I am getting things ready for my trip. I will probably get to the Airport by train on Sunday morning arriving about 10:30. That fits in best with getting a lift to the train station rather than anything else. Once there I will check in, maybe do some shopping and go up to the Qantas Club... And veg out. And wait for the plane to leave.

I am getting things ready - so far I have about US$21 in my wallet from previous trips. I thought I had some coins, but I could only find 1c pieces so I will not have coins. I will have some $1 notes for tips. I have cleared out my laptop bag and removed all the sort of junk that they do not really like you carrying on planes. Tools and that sort of thing.

Darryl's tip for the week: When you are going to somewhere which has significant baggage allowances, take a spare bag folded up in your suitcase in case you want to bring back more than you can fit in your case. After lunch I need to do some washing so that I can start packing by bag in ernest.

I am still somewhat stiff and sore from the last couple of days of work. Let me paint a picture of one of the things I was doing. We needed to install a chandelier above the stairs. This was fine. In order to be able to change globes we had more cable than needed in the roof. Fine. But I was the one who needed to pull through the draw wire.

This was fine. Except this house contains central air conditioning. And the central box which is about 1m x 1m x 70cm is suspended about 30cm above the roof. Directly over the chandelier. Which meant that I needed to lie on my back with my face right next to the bottom of the air conditioner, with my head back at some horrible angle pulling through the draw wire. This is the sort of thing that charopractors love, with the potential to pay for their childrens education... All in all a real pain.

I have muscles and joints that are sore right now that I did not know I had. I will quickly recover though. I will post more later... promise

I am really tired right now - I have just returned home after a full days installing light fittings. I lost count of how many I installed. Far too many. There were a number of different types - track lights, down lights, sensor lights. Everything. What they all had in common is that they required work to install them. I think I put in close to nine hours today, and a similar amount yesterday.

I did not get the work finished, but my friends are going to get someone in who is more used to getting up on ladders two stories above the ground installing stuff. Like installing 12 down lights in the eves two stories up. We have run most of the wire, but not installed the lights.

I needed to go into the roof at one stage and it was really really horrible. I did not have a face mask, and it was a bit dusty. What was worse was that it was warm making it really horrible to be up there. I just had perseration pouring off me.

I really want to say more, but I am just not up to it right now... More soon

Today I will be doing more wiring... I hope not to spend as much time there today as tomorrow, but we will see.

Google have just released a new type of search - Blog Search. This will search only Blogs for content. Looking for my stuff? Some of it can be found here. here is an interesting article about the internals of network printing cards...

The Wall Street Journal has an article on how doctors are starting to sue their paitients about what is being said online.

A friend of mine calls Computer Associates as a place where 'Old softwar goes to die'. Well, The Register is describing a company where executives (failed and otherwise) go to do the same. Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina is the latest big name to join Steve Case's League of Extraordinary Banished Executives - otherwise known as Revolution Health Group (RHG). As a director of RHG, Carly will sit with Franklin Raines, the former CEO and chairman of disgraced mortgage financier Fannie Mae; Steve Wiggins, who was pushed out of his post as chairman at Oxford Health Plans; and Colin Powell, who couldn't stomach four more years of Bush. Professional board member and Netscape worshipper Jim Barksdale also has a spot at the RHG table.

I have just almost finished my code. What do I mean by Almost Finished? Hmm... What a stupid comment to make you might say. Well, the code is doing what it is supposed to. It is sending a bit too much debug information, but it can send and receieve SMS messages.

The code is actually working. My SMS bill is higher than it has been for many months, but I can without issue send SMS messages to my phone and get them from my phone... How do I explain what I am doing... Imaging that I have a biscuit machine that I have sold to a customer. And they pay me to maintain it. Well, I might want to monitor the machine to know how many hours it has run, or it might tell me that something has failed.

Or I can control it telling it to do some type of maintainence from my mobile phone. Or if it is my machine, I can SMS it a command that might say turn on the oven. So that when I get into the bakery an hour later the overn is almost hot enough to start cooking... That is sort of what I do as a job - simply.

I have just got home from a long day at work. I was putting lights in at a friends house. All in all I think I put in about 11 down lights, four normal outside lights, two outside sensor lights (of which one does not work... Oops... Fix that tomorrow)... A chandelier. And there is more to do tomorrow. This is for my friend who is going to work for Google. Basically he is getting his house up to where it can be rented out... He and his wife have not got round to fitting the light fittings until now.

Basically I am exhausted after all that. It has been good exercise. And there are two things I hate in roofs... Fibreglass insulation, and air conditioners. This house has both.

On a big OOPS, theives in the UK have stollen $65,000 in odd socks. The socks were for a supermarket promotion of a book called The Oddies, about where all the Odd Socks go.

There is a story on The Register about GoogleEarth and how it is undermining military security around the world. By making the photos freely available. ZDNet is reporting that Boradband over Power Lines is being released in Tasmania...

Finally, Time Magazine has a story about the development of the iPod Nano.

Photo of the Day

Music:

The TechQuarium site has instructions on how to turn your old Mac into an Aquarium. One of these days I will build one of these. The TreeHugger site has some instructions on how to purify water using a UV tube. This will not remove chemical decontaminants, but will kill off all bacterial and viral contaminants in the water.

Following the Kazaa case, Groklaw has an article on what the court decision was. But the owner of Groklaw made a few comments on Australian law...

"I learned quite a lot from the article. I confess that I was stunned to learn of a case in Australia where a library was held guilty of infringement by authorization because it had placed a copying machine next to a stack of library books. Here's a snip from the beginning of the ruling:

In the belief that some of the copying of copyright material which is done within university libraries, by the use of photocopying machines, amounts to an infringement of the copyright, it was decided to commence a test case against a university, and for this purpose it was arranged that one Paul Brennan, a graduate of the University of New South Wales, should make an infringing copy of a literary work by the use of a photocopying machine in the library of the University of New South Wales.

Does common sense no longer rule? What is this excessive fear of copying? ... And you thought it was getting silly in the US. When authors decide to entrap librarians in order to criminalize them, something is really and truly going haywire. "

There is only one problem with the comment 'Does Common Sense No longer Rule?'. This decision was in the high court 30 years ago. This is the court case that made libraries put up signs describing the copyright act next to the machines.

Project Guttenburg now have AudioBooks... Not many human read ones yet, but I guess soon there will be a whole lot more...

I have just finished watching Geoffery Robertsons Hypertheticals. Rather an interesting show, and channel 9 has not improved it's editing over the years. This show was brutally edited making it hard at times to keep up. Questions were edited out, and only the answers were included at times.

But what was interesting was that the former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahatier was on the show via video conference, and he seemed to be really enjoying himself in this context.

With some decent editing this would have been a really great show. But with the present editing it was an OK show...

I did a run this morning - I think I must have run about just under 4km. It was good, but I was getting out of breath and tired near the end. My fitness levels are certainly improving significantly. I Might even get to do another run this afternoon depending on how my work is going.

Tomorrow I have to do some work for a soon to be Google employee who needs some help to get his house into shape before he crosses the Pacific to the Googogplex in Mountain View, California.

Oh, sunday night I saw 'Strange Bedfellows' staring Paul Hogan and Michael Keaton. This was set in Yackandandah, and was totally hilarious. I loved it - it was a cool movie. And what makes it better is that Yackandandah is a real place. It is probably 3km north of Melbourne, just south of Albury, in the Indigo Shire. Quaint little town...

Quick Update...

One of my spare time activities at the moment is a tracker system for gliders. This is becoming really interesting. We have more orders already for this product than for any other product I have every worked on... I might even get a chance to go up in a glider at some stage for a run. Sounds like an interesting exercise.

It will probably have the option of an ADSB interface too, allowing the monitoring and tracking of GA aircraft too eventually. This is a really exciting project.

As an addendum, the LA Times is reporting a major power outage in Los Angeles. Actually, this was first reported in the SMH. Thankfully the power outage is mostly over, any my Web Server which is located in LA was not affected

ArsTechnica has a review of the iPod Mini, and to top that off, they look at how much work is needed to actually kill the device. But they did it for a purpose - to also show the internals of the device. Looks like an interesting toy. Basically Apple are killing off the iPod MINI, and replacing it with the Nano, which has 2-4 GBytes of flash memory, but no HDD. Interesting toy.

I have just arranged a meeting with my Canadian reseller when I am in the USA. It will be good to finally meet him, and talk about how to move forward with things. Between now and then I need to prepare two talks for the conference. One of them is effectively the same as I did last year so that will be very quick. But the other one is from scratch. Argh.

Today I have some programming to do, and some hardware work too. I have some hardware arriving in the mail so I can complete one job for a client - the SMS thing... That should be very quick once the hardware arrives... Better go... I have a call to make [and yes, it is only 7am!]

Quick Link... According to DesignTechnica, AOL have purchased SKYPE for $4.1 billion. As of today, there have been 164 million downloads. That might give 100m users since some users have downloaded the software more than once. That means that at a bare minimum the company is worth $40 per user. That is a lot of money.

The $4.1b is made up of $1.3b cash, $1.3b stock, and the rest in 'rewards'.

Looking at the job this morning was fairly easy. I will probably need to bring in a friend to work on this job. It is one of those that I cannot work on myself. There are a couple of people I can think of to help. Basically some of this job will be a real pain but it will not be hard...

Since at this time next week I will be in the USA, I thought I would recap one of my previous visits here... This was back at the beginning of 2001 when I did a technology demonstration for a really big company. I was working with REZN8, based in Hollywood in Sunset Blvd.

In this project I took a Rabbit microcontroller, and connected this up to a radio and a GPS and built a radio based tracking system.

The DCC Conference schedule came out a few momoents ago... Friday morning (friday week) I have the first talk of the conference, talking about Google Earth. Then the next morning I have a talk about an introduction to APRS. This will effectively be the same as last years talk. So I only have one presentation to prepare.

I just saw an article called The SIX dumbest ideas in Computer Security. This was a great read. The best part of this article was the following quote...

"Several years ago I had a client who was preparing to spend a ton of money on a technology without testing it operationally. I suggested offhandedly to the senior IT manager in charge that he should send one of his team to a relevant conference (in this case, LISA) where it was likely that someone with hands-on experience with the technology would be in attendance. I proposed that the manager have his employee put a message on the "meet and greet" bulletin board that read:
"Do you have hands-on experience with xyz from pdq.com? If so, I'm authorized to take you to dinner at Ruth's Chris if you promise to give me the low-down on the product off the record. Contact, etc..." The IT manager later told me that a $200 dinner expense saved them over $400,000 worth of hellish technological trauma.

That site also has a link to Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle by Richard Feynman. This is an interesting read... Very Interesting.

I just saw a note letting me know that a resupply mission had just arrived at the International Space Station. Normally this would not have interested me too much. It is just that the SuitSat project was due to be sent up there soon, and I am hoping that the SuitSat was on this mission. SuitSat is a Satellite to be placed into an old russian space suite, and was designed by a friend of mine. Since I will be seeing him next week I will find out the story then I would guess.

ARStechnical has just released microsofts list of versions of Windows Vista. The reason for the seven varieties is mostly for financial reasons. Some of them are so that corporate users who may not have Widows 'Phoning Home', and removing features that would make those versions of windows useful to people who do not want to pay for it. I can see the sense in this, but seven versions seems a bit extreme.

Lastly, before breakfast, The BBC has an interesting story on Chernobyl, which they are describing as a modern day Pompai... Reather an interesting article...