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Flying out to Australia

By Truman Boyes · · 3 min read

Flying out to Australia tomorrow. Just got a call back from Qantas telling me the flt has been cancelled. Quickly booked through Air New Zealand.

Early morning flights are a pain, but hopefully I will be able to bang out some more on this DHCP chapter for the book.

A paper that I wrote recently (sorry no link as it's geared for my customer's network) is being put through a review process. The documents that I write are usually written in MS Word 2004 for OS X, diagrams by Omnigraffle 4.0. I have tried to write things with OpenOffice but somethings just don't feel correct about the way OpenOffice works. OpenOffice is fast; actually it is considerably faster than MS Office on my PowerBook G4 867Mhz with 768M of RAM.

That's another thing; I have been thinking about picking up the MacBookPro 15" at some point. Buying it in New Zealand is not worth the price or hassle of the pre-order. The price is marked up by a good 300-400 dollars even with the currency conversion from USD to NZD. I have been thinking of picking it up in HongKong, and if the model that I want is in stock when I get there, then I think the deal is done.

In other news, I made some calls to the states on Sipphone.com from my Asterisk (running on the Mac mini of course!), and the call quality was pretty good. Although the calls were good, I am getting some strange SIP errors in my logs that I need to sort out. Aparently there are some SIP 404 messages that scroll by every now and again, but the calls work just fine. I migrated my dialplan over from Broadvoice, which was a pretty good service but I could not really justify the cost of a monthly service from them. I liked the idea of unlimited dialing to 20-something countries for $20USD/month but I rarely was home enough to make enough calls to justify the cost. Sipphone.com is pre-paid, so I topped it up with $10USD and I just dial freely. I haven't tried any international calls yet, but I assume they work just fine. If anyone has some advice on a good IAX peer with cheap USA DIDs and cheap international minutes, I would be happy to check them out as well.

Last night I watched some videos on youtube.com. That site has become so popular these days, and it's really quite interesting on their model. They don't tell you what to do with the site, they just host the videos in a pretty clean layout, and allow tagging, comments, and bookmarking. It's a simple design, a simple concept. Now, I don't quite get the business model, although I have not looked to find it. I suppose it's one of these web sites that it just trying to get visitors so that they can sell it off to one of these advertising holding companies or what have you. Maybe it's just trying to follow in MySpace's footsteps. And BTW, what the heck is this Web2.0 stuff. I really need to read up on this stuff.

And if that's not enought to learn up on, I have been dabbling in Python lately, trying to get the time to finish up some scripts, and also interested in Ruby on Rails. There is just too much cool stuff, and not enough time. Surely there must be a way to get more time back in the day. Maybe I need to spend some time looking at Getting Things Done (GTD).

Originally published on trumanboyes.blogspot.com. See the archived copy.