At my work, I occasionally end up with pieces of equipment that were once deployed at customer sites or in our own production datacenter that are no longer required. On this occasion, one of our clients replaced their Draytek Vigor3300 router with something else, and decided they didn’t care what happened to the deprecated device.
Read moreThere is only so long I can put this off, so here it is - my Quakecon 2010 plus swag report. For those not in the know Quakecon is a free annual event where gamers from all across the United States (and even a few from around the world) meet to play computer games and share in the awesomeness that is iD Software.
Read moreToday is our last full day both on holiday and in New York. Five days really isn’t long enough to even scratch the surface of New York city, let alone the surrounding areas. At the very least I’d like to think I’ve managed to explore through a decent cross section and have found inspiration in the things I have seen.
Read moreSomething about crossing the international date line, plus the inevitable time zone change, has a way of completely destroying your sense of time.
So our day starts with our flights, one from Sydney to Los Angeles; and another from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Thirteen and a half hours later and after extracting the remains of my knees from the back of the seat in front of me, we had the joyous task of going through US customs and border control which has become even more sluggish than last year.
A quick walk to the departures area gets us back on track with our connecting flight.
Our accommodation is located near Fishermans Wharf, basically the northern end of San Francisco. After getting checked and connected to the internet (very important) we set out to get the lay of the land and find some food. The next few pictures basically show the story of our exploration trip; beginning with our location, our delicious food and the inevitable result of Ricci (aka Cheatachu) finding a candy store.
After all this we decided to head towards the commercial districts of the city in search of phones, basically for emergency contact. We must have walked around for a good half an hour or so before finding a shop that sold phones (and of course the moment we walk out we find 3 others within short walking distance).
The mobile phone situation in the United States is interesting and quite fail. Basically the networks are overpriced and have few decent services. It’s almost impossible to get prepaid mobile data or 3G network access. Most of the providers here also use old CDMA networks (like the ones Telstra and Orange/3 scrapped years ago in Australia). It’s almost impossible to buy a prepaid sim without a phone. I never thought I’d say this but I miss Telstra.