New laptop for the family

John's been talking for some time now about getting a laptop for work. We've been keeping an eye out for reasonably priced laptops that would suit his needs but nothing has really stood out as price worthy. Most of the sub-grand lappies were all criminally ugly and horribly ill equipped to handle the ubiquitous plague of Windows Vista.

Finally managed to hit pay-dirt this weekend on an impromptu trip into Harvey Norman while we were out doing odd jobs. A Compaq Presario was on offer with enough grunt to run reasonably and wouldn't scare away the aesthetically sensitive. In fact, at $950 it even outspecs Gemini in some areas, and I paid considerably more than that a little over two years ago. Ah, the life of a technology enthusiast.

Fueled by the excitement of our purchase, we invited ourselves over to John and Sheena's for the night on Saturday so that I could set the new machine up and give John a quick walk through with his new machine.



John was suitably impressed by the electronics disclaimer, in four languages to boot.

I spent most of the afternoon, and probably half of mum and dad's download quota, setting up the machine. It's disgusting how much trash HP and Microsoft have installed by default, most of which are obviously trial versions that are meant to entice further purchases. Being the cheapskate that I am, I promptly removed these to install FOSS equivalents. Well... maybe just free...

• Open Office
• Picasa
• Skype
• AVG Antivirus
• Chrome

Alison and I then subjected John, who was very patient, to a basic but thorough tutorial in computer use. I think he did very well and I'm sure he'll be making good use of the computer in no time. Might need to find a free typing tutor for him to speed up his chicken pecking though. :)

Head Boppin'

As a change to our usual lethargic Saturday evenings, Alison and I caught a train into Brunswick Street to check out the Valley Fiesta. We'd haven't bothered going in previous years as most of the bands playing weren't familiar to us... not entirely surprising when you consider our music tastes. This year however Charlie's band (The Boat People) were playing a set at a respectable time (6:00) for early retirees so we figured we'd best turn up to mosh.



Krit and Charlie also just had some pretty exciting news to share. He'd popped "the question" on stage in their last gig, which we unfortunately missed because we're losers. Thankfully someone was recording the event for posterity.



I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't really listened to their music before. They don't have wailing female lead singers but I still found myself enjoying it. Bought a couple of tracks off iTunes to help support the boys. Quirky and fun!

Music

Seems like I'm in a bit of an experimental mood. Just signed up for a last.fm account to try to expand my musical horizon as I seem to be listening to the same four albums again and again. I'd read about Pandora before and found the concept of a "music genome project" a fascinating one. If it works right you should be able to submit artists you like and the service will make new recommendations based on your selections.

Due to stupid licensing issues we can't use Pandora here in Australia, or anywhere else outside the US it seems. Thankfully last.fm seems to be free of this rubbish. Played around with it a little and uploaded my listening history to my account and resulting recommendations have been promising.

I especially like how you can plug an artist in and have a custom radio station of similar music created just for you. It works pretty well for the more common western artists but I must say that the recommendations I received for "Hitomi Yaida" weren't all that impressive. Seemed like they just chucked in every J-Pop band they could think of in there. Symptom of a limited Japanese music library perhaps.

Even so I've gotten quite a few new names to look up (excuse my teenage girl like taste in music)

• Sarah Blasko
• Rachael Yamagata
• Aimee Mann
• Charlotte Martin

As with my other recent web 2.0 take up, I've added a little gadget to the Rabbit on the right side so that the Internet can snigger at my song choices in unison. Enjoy.

Unconditional

The day we've been waiting for has finally arrived. Alison got a call late in the day to inform us that the contract of sale on our unit has just gone unconditional. For people outside Australia this basically means that the buyers have no option to back out now, and come settlement date on the 13th of October will be legally bound to fork over the cash to us... I mean the bank.

We'd been hearing pretty positive noises from all parties involved through the two week period post contract, but you just never know in this market. There have been far too many stories floating around of contracts falling through on the last minute due to dodgy finance or a change of heart. Thankfully the news has been saturated with predictions of upcoming interest rate drops so the property market has been rather upbeat as a result.

To celebrate Alison and I had wanted to check out Blue Smoke, a saliva inducing restaurant in New Farm that Dan had told us about. Much to our dismay we discovered that the place was not open on Monday, so we settled for a night of Turkish cuisine at Ahmets instead.



We'll probably leave Blue Smoke for another dinner this week. Satiated by an overflowing meat platter and the smokey aftertaste of baba ganoush, I think it's time to enjoy a night of sleep free of property related stress. At least until we have to start thinking about moving...