Yer Old

I've never really thought seriously about getting old. I have always thought of myself as getting older but not once had I sat back and thought, "Shite, your getting old....". Well now I have, albeit a rather drunken thought but still, it remained with me throughout one of my all day hangovers.

I'm not sure what triggered it, but as I was being driven around town by some girl I hadn't met before and unlikely to meet ever again (my friend was in the front passenger seat) something in my head clicked over. It also should be noted that my friend and the two girls in the car were a few years younger than me, I'm guessing early twenties?? I didn't have a clue what the girl sitting next to me in the back seat was babbling about, nor the one in the front. Something about somebody's boyfriend being a prick, someone's boyfriends mother being a cow and something else about another one of their friends being a bitch... heh... I'm just guessing there on the last one... but it's a pretty safe bet. Now it should be said that I had no real interest in getting to know either of these two, I am sure they are great people and I wish them all the best. It's just that everyone at my friend's house had fallen asleep and me being a geek and not used to going to sleep before 2:00-3:30am was wide awake... and not nearly drunk enough to call it a night.

We pulled up out the front some seemingly random house but unfortunately the alcohol had ran out and the party had drifted on to the pub. Which was a pity because I was just about to have a good drunken discussion with one of the dudes out the front. Ahhh... not to be, "Hey man, we're going!" came a yell from the car. So we then drove around some more bitching about this and that, I contributed as best I could trying to find some common ground. This continued until quite late.... I think it was half five by the time I shut my eyes. I remember watching a skate video and seeing light creep through the window but there are a couple of lost hours in there.

I have to say that it's not that I didn't enjoy the night, I had a ball. It's just that it reminded me of what me and friends used to do...."Back in the day".
....WAIT....
There it is. That's what made me feel old. Back in the day.
Back in the day to me was doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. No thinking about consequences or responsibilities, whatever happens happens and whatever doesn't doesn't.

These days I have to make time for myself to go out and do random things and see if my mates can get a "night" pass to do the same. Everyone is having kids and starting to get there family life in order or established. I congratulate them and respect them highly for that and it has brought out a side in some of them that I have rarely seen in them and I like it.

I guess stepping out of a long relationship has left me with something I'm not used to.... freedom. The freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want, whatever happens happens and whatever doesn't doesn't. All with a few more restrictions than "Back in the day" of course...

Which finally brings me to my point, I'm pretty sure no one reads this blog anyway so I'm not sorry at all for the length of my posts. And if somebody does read this, please leave a comment about when you have felt "old".

The whole point of this post is that on the 9th of March it's "Get over it day". Damn good timing if I do say. Get over it you cynical old bastard, live it up.

Get Over It Day [mahalo.com]

Bigpond Wireless Broadband - It's what you use when you have to.

First off, Bigpond: You give me the shits.
I don't have a problem with their services at all. I love the fact that they appear to like open source software and provide unmetered downloads that are based on user requests. I mean hell, I can request a full linux distro dvd download and a day later I get a nice email stating that it is available for download in the unmetered File Download section. They also allow TWIT netcasts, all of the Revision3 IPTV releases basically anything that falls under the Creative Commons or open source category.

Recently Bigpond even decided to add a Ubuntu repository into the unmetered category as well (no multiverse repository but I can live without that), in fact that is one of the main reasons I have moved from other distro's to Ubuntu. Bigpond Office is also worth a mention here also.... although I have never used it. I'm guessing it's a little like the online Google office services with word processing, spreadsheet and presentaition applications and a whopping 250MB storage. I'm not taking the piss here 250MB should be enough for most casual users to store their online generated material.

I also don't really mind waiting a couple of hours for their customer service phone representatives to take me off of hold and actually address my internet connection problems. I usually have it sorted out by the time they get to me anyway, it must the hold music that kicks my brain into gear. When I do finally get to talk to someone there is always something else I want to ask about them anyway so it's never a wasted call.

My biggest gripe with Bigpond is their Wireless Broadband service. Until recently we were paying around $160 for a 550kbps to a "supposed" 1.5Mbps connection with a 3GB data cap with excess usage charged at $0.15 per MB. The speed has since been bumped up to 550kbps - 3.0Mbps and the price dropped to $114 with a 3GB data cap with excess usage RAISED to $0.30 per MB. WTF??

!STOP THE FREAKING BUS!

Hmm.... let's think about this for a second. They increase the speed, increase the excess usage charge, drop the price and leave the data cap the same?? I couldn't give a crap how much faster the connection is if we can still only get the same amount of content. Sure the monthly price drop was nice but why the hell wouldn't they increase the data cap? Why the hell did they double the excess usage charge?? An why the hell is the highest data cap plan at 3 gig?? Why all of this when they have inevitably halved the time we can reach our data cap and then double the penalty for exceeding it? I can only think of one reason.... $$$.

As the internet is growing up, the data requirement to browse different sites is increasing. Flash videos for example are everywhere and some sites still insist on making their whole site to run off of flash. I don't have a problem with flash I think it's a great delivery medium for static audio and video streaming. Web 2.0 has brought a lot of cool technologies to how we view the net and the integration of mixed media draws a lot of bandwidth. For a perfect example bigpond should look at their own site, it's big, bloated and uses a fair amount of bandwidth to render itself into a browser. Thankfully the bigpond site is unmetered for bigpond users or it would be easy enough to blow the data cap by just trying to go through the site to look at my mail through the webmail client.

And so to Bigpond I say this:
At the very least jst give us 5 gig for the same price and keep your lousy $0.30 per MB excess usage going and I'll be happy.... Oh and you can even drop our maximum speed back to 550kbps - 1.5Mbps.
Thanks.

Oh and as a side note to the last Bigpond customer service representative I spoke to:
No, I do not believe you are Australian or in Australia even though you swore black and blue that you were. Melbourne is NOT the capital city of New South Wales and New South Wales is nowhere near my hometown you friggin' douchebag! And no, I do not live closer than 7 k's from a telephone exchange.... I think I would know as I happen to live here. Do some research before you get all frothy at the mouth and listen to someone who knows where they live instead of using your fingers trying to count. Christ, I'll even send you a goddamn map if you like....

*EDIT*
Okay, so my research was flawed. I was Informed that the excess data charge has not gone up to $0.30, it remains at $0.15 per MB. For some reason (thankfully) our plan has kept the excess data charge locked in at the original rate.
Oh, I decided to tone this post down a bit.... I'm not so annoyed now I've had a chance to vent.