mykrocosm

I went to the bank to close an account and transfer the balance to another account. Filled out the form and away it went. “Not a problem,” says they, “only takes 24 hours.”

A week later, not a dollar had budged! So I went in again. The account had been closed, and there was $0 in it. But the money had not appeared in my other account! “So where’d the money go?” I asked. “That’s what I’m wondering too!” says she.

They spent ten minutes looking up someone’s phone number. She then spent another ten minutes on the phone, and confirmed the money was safe somewhere (though she wasn’t sure exactly where). Then she told me I had to fill out the form again. So we spent another five minutes doing that. Then they told me they require a 100 point identity check. I didn’t have enough ID points on me, so now I have go back again tomorrow and repeat the whole damn rigarole for the third bloody time.

Now just remember, this is a transfer of money between two accounts under the SAME name, with the SAME signature, at the SAME bank.

Thank you for wasting three of my lunch breaks Commonwealth Bank, you shitlicking fuckwads!

The regular water deliveries got screwed up somehow, so Mark and I launched a lightning raid on the EPD department upstairs and made off with 4 bottles. The office administrator tracked us down through eye-witness accounts and we got an good scolding … now I know why they call her Mum.

We’re all on water rations now - half a cup of coffee each

Just read a great blog post talking about the history of Internet Messaging clients. A nice nostalgic read for those of us who remember the heady days of ICQ circa 1997-98.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/nugget/97081.html

Haven’t blogged for a while - I bought a bungalow near the city, and it’s been a crazy few weeks. It’s supposed to be an investment while we continue renting our current place, but I must say the place is kind of growing on us, and on our friends and family too.

I’m very risk-adverse by nature, so I had a mild panic attack the first night I walked into the empty house. My sleep patterns have also been a little erratic lately, but I think it’ll pass when I get a good tenant in there. It’s early days yet.

You’ve no doubt seen (or avoided) this show on TV, where two families of opposite values (rich/poor, fat/thin, etc) swap their wives for a week. I always wondered how much money they got for having a stack of cameras stuffed into their home. Turns out, from a Boing Boing entry, they pull in a cool $20k per family.

Almost makes me wish I had a dysfunctional family so I could put them on shows like this! They’re looking for a US geek family right now, so check out the link if you qualify.

I’ve been struggling to get comfortable with bittorrent technology for some time. The original BitTorrent client, and even many of the “improved” third party clients such as Azureus, are Java based, slow, clunky and unattractive.

I have a pretty tight firewall setup and because every torrent tracker uses a different port number I was constantly having to open and close ports, a painful and annoying process. Some of these clients claimed to support Universal Plug and Play to automagically open these ports as needed, but it never seemed to work very well.

Then one day I found BitComet.

BitComet has a very slick, sexy interface. It’s extremely responsive and beautifully designed. The software uses colours and icons very effectively to present information. UP&P works out of the box, and best of all, no Java. It’s written in C++.

Seen these get good wraps on hiking / backpacking forums :

www.hennessyhammock.com

They do look pretty cool. Hmm.. I wonder if they can make a two-person model?