For the most part I’m usually happy with NAB Internet Banking. They have a reasonably nice web interface and it also scales down reasonably well onto a mobile device. Functionality wise it has a lot of capabilities including some I wished Wells Fargo had (international transfer being the primary one) and I’m yet to find myself wanting from it. However there are some quirks and it seems just recently, I hit all of them.
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The other day I was looking at something and came across “Hotaru CMS” which on it’s about page describes the system as a “plugin powered content management system” or “Wordpress without blogging”. The system describes that it is a platform to build upon, that “Hotaru plugins provide such key components as user systems and post publishing” and how it has a few different extension types: main themes, admin themes, plugins and language packs. But it got me thinking – wait, this is just Joomla!?
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I was sitting in Joomla! Bug Squad today chatting about browsers. Firefox 3.5 is almost ready (I’m typing on a release candidate with it, I’ve been using it since beta, I used 3.0 when it was still ‘Minefield’) and Safari 4 has been recently released (another one that I used throughout beta). Each offer improvements in speed over their predecessor which got me thinking about the progression of different browsers.

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Dodo isn’t on my list of preferred providers. I’ve had friends with bad experiences and again today I just had another one. I was visiting my girlfriends sister’s place for dinner and I was doing a bit of work on my laptop whilst we all watched a movie. I also tried to grab a Freelancer mod (Void) which was about 80MB. It isn’t much and Dodo has stupidly large bandwidth caps so I figured I’d grab it. It got to about 30MB in and the speed had gone from the max the 512k connection could handle to a paltry 5kb/s and still slowing down. I figured initially that it was the file sharing hosts bandwidth that was causing it, they were slowing down the free connections to encourage people to sign up. It’d basically taken hours for it to download and it was still less than halfway when we’d decided to leave so I decided to start the download at home. For the entire download it didn’t miss a beat and barely went below 5kb/s of the max speed on the connection – the download was finished before I realised it. Quite funny when Dodo advertises their connection as “internet that flies” – perhaps their internet flies just as well as their mascot does.

My preferred Internet provider is Netspace. So much so that I’ve recommended it to people and beyond myself I know of about five other people who have gone to them on my recommendation. They offer reasonable price and when you can get to their technical staff, the ones that I have encountered seem very reasonable and knowledgeable. The key is getting through. I’m writing this blog post whilst waiting on hold for Netspace about a billing enquiry. As I type it has been over 25 minutes of waiting.

At the moment my dad is planning on moving house having sold his current house. He has a 1.5MBit Netspace connection on a plan that doesn’t exist any more (a grandfathered plan) and I want to change it to his new location. After 31 minutes I had my answer: the other connection will have to be disconnected (have the codes removed from the line, 48 hours) and then the other one transferred. They can do the transfer but it will take 5 to 10 business days for it to be processed by Telstra (they didn’t mention Telstra but being ADSL1 there isn’t another option). I guess now I have to do the hard work and paperwork.