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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Today Apple announced their plan on changing the way the textbook industry works. To achieve this they’ve released a new tool called “iBooks Author” which provides a WYSIWYG interface to building ePUB files. Essentially the rub is that while you can use it to build content and you can give it away for free in any of the formats you want, if you want to sell it you have to use the iBookstore. But let’s take a look back at the product for a second.
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Once upon a time I was a happy Telstra customer. I had switched to Telstra from Optus after the release of the iPhone4 having realised that I was paying Optus the same amount of money as Telstra was charging to effectively get the same level of service, perhaps even a little less from Optus than what Telstra offered.
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At Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in 2007, Steve Jobs came on stage to announce a launch date for the very first iPhone and to announce how developers would build applications for the iPhone. His announcement was that his suggested way of developing for the iPhone was to write web apps (it is a couple of minutes in). So what was the reaction to that?
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Today was the nail in the coffin of the Samsung Galaxy S that I use at work to do Android based testing of the library’s future work in the mobile area. The device is a stock device running Android 2.1 (Samsung’s updater app cowardly refuses to upgrade it to 2.2 for some reason) however as the device is for testing and since it has WiFi built in I’ve decided to use that. It isn’t connected to the cellular data network (or even have a SIM card) and this has lead to some interesting problems.
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It sounds like a line that you get given when you probably don’t have a chance at what ever it is. But it is the sort of line I would have liked to have seen from the insurers this evening. Almost every insurer said “I’m sorry, we can’t insure you over the phone” to my online quote and encouraged me to call them. What I would like to see is a call back facility. Suncorp in particular has a 24 hour phone line I can ring so why not ask me what my phone number is and offer to call me in the next 10 minutes based on their call centre load. In fact if I’m going to call them now then that is the same thing! Depressing!

I’ll admit I’m not the greatest fan of the modern word processor. Being in the web world perhaps the greatest evil is the markup that is generated when text copied from Word is pasted into any rich text capable HTML editor such as TinyMCE. Word is not alone in doing this, OpenOffice.org also has its fair share of ugly HTML and most other systems have a nasty habit of creating ugly HTML. But this isn’t what I’m concerned about in this blog, it is more about the plethora of formatting options it provides and lack of focus in the user interface.
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In Australia, it’s tax time again. This means that the tax office sends me nice letters saying how much I owe them for my HECS/HELP debt, how if I paid it all up front it’d reduce by X amount (if only I had that much money!) and how they don’t charge “interest” on the loan, they merely “index” it against the cost of living. What ever makes it easier to sleep at night. But recently I realised something simple: the Australian Tax Office charges interest not including amounts you’ve already paid.
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So lately I’ve had issues with CNC4. I paid for it and ended up downloading a server emulator to play the game. It even gave me the pre-order mission anyway. A while back I got EzyDVD’s Battlestar Galactica collection. Every single episode of the new series plus Razor and The Plan. It also has the 1978 and 1980′s material as well. It is a box and IMHO very well presented. Early on one of the DVD’s wasn’t playing properly, I put it in my Mac and it worked on both my Mac and the PC. I tried Season 3 Disc 4 today and that isn’t working. Fortunately I have DVD rips of season three downloaded so I stopped watching “the real thing” and swapped to the pirate. The pirate copy doesn’t require me to sit through two sets of copyright notices, Universal’s gratuitous logo and then wait for their fancy little intro sequences just to watch a single episode.

So much for the real thing. I want to spend money on supporting things but Firefly and Dollhouse is proof that doesn’t matter either. The fact that it takes ages for a Region 4 DVD to come out (compared to Region 1 and 2) so I can’t at times legally buy something anyway. Let alone the fact some things never get released in Australia anyway. Rather depressing at the end of the day.

I had a thought the other day about smoking. The problem with banning smoking is two fold. The first problem is that you put out a large corporation that makes lots of money, pays some taxes and pays more towards your electoral campaign. It also employs people. The second problem is harder: smoking has a significant addicted population. These people vote. So not only do you have corporations with donations but people who vote.

But I feel there is a curious middle ground to be made. Each year increase the minimum age to buy cigarettes – or simpler, those born after a particular year cannot buy cigarettes. This way older smokers aren’t threatened and eventually dissipate and it is hard for newer smokers to get started. A curious example is that of slightly older members of social groups or families being able to supply cigarettes to younger people who can’t buy it yet. As the age increases, this will become increasingly hard to do and slowly this impact will dissipate. This strategy also gives the ability for those companies producing cigarettes to diversify into other areas.

The main complication with doing this is international travel. If one can reasonably travel to another part of the world and become addicted then this poses a problem. Ideally there would be a global ban like this but I don’t foresee that happening.

A simple thought on a weekend afternoon.