www.nickhodge.com

Finally, Win­dows Mobile 6 for Palm Treo 750 is down­load­able and installable

Thanks, Kleefy for find­ing this one.

I do won­der why it took so long for the formal Tel­stra ver­sion to arrive.

“presen­ted by pro­fes­sional com­puter geek Nick Hodge”  lulz (mean­ing I am laugh­ing at the fun­ni­ness of my title being on a large banner!)

Thanks to Kaye Fal­lick from the About Seni­ors web­site and magazine for the invit­a­tion to inter­act with the Mel­bourne seni­ors audience.

Most inter­est­ing story of these present­a­tions: a lady impressed me with her data secur­ity plan for old hard disk drives: phys­ical destruc­tion plus encas­ing them in her new cement stairs. I just love it!

Spoke to 170 people over the two ses­sions — each ses­sions was slightly dif­fer­ent, but used these slides as the base present­a­tion.

Good to see Australia’s largest seni­ors web site: About Seni­ors, Tel­stra Big­pond, Work­Ven­tures and the local Microsoft Unlim­ited Poten­tial all a part of this conference.

Sup­per Room, Mel­bourne Town Hall, Thursday 11^th Octo­ber 2007

Sup­per Room, Mel­bourne Town Hall, Sat­urday 13^th Octo­ber 2007

Thursday 11^th and Sat­urday 13^th Octo­ber in Mel­bourne for the About Seni­ors week.

Sat­urday 27^th and Sunday 28^th Octo­ber in Perth for Pod­Camp Perth.

I work online. I live online.

I am a cus­tomer of Inter­node (home ADSL, VoIP, via Tel­stra copper-wire) and Tel­stra NextG (USB card for remote work­ing). There are two Fox­tel digital units in my house. Host­ing for this web site is some­where in the US with Dream­host. My super­an­nu­ation fund is a minor Tel­stra round 3 share­holder. My cor­por­ate mobile phone is Tel­stra NextG; both voice and data services. 

The cur­rent argu­ments back and forth between Tel­stra and the “group-of-9″, the politi­cians who have “solved the band­width” prob­lem, ACCC and every­one else who is involved in this high-asset, high-customer-volume, highly com­pet­it­ive busi­ness; are start­ing to really piss me off. 

There I said it. Piss me off. Really piss me off. I am almost postal.

Today, I spent 4 hours upload­ing a video into the cor­por­ate cloud. I am attempt­ing to save some car­bon atoms from escap­ing into the atmo­sphere by doing what was once a poten­tial pan­acea: tele-commuting. Work­ing online. Earn­ing tax dol­lars by liv­ing in Australia.

Really, it shouldn’t take that long.

What is this FTTN (Fibre to the Node) thing any­way? I see no bene­fit to the end cus­tomer as noone is actu­ally put­ting a piece of fibre into each house. It seems to be a large charade to divert attention.

Where is the com­pet­i­tion? Where is my choice? Do any politi­cians actu­ally use the inter­net apart from watch­ing You­tubes of our little Prime Min­is­ter? Less reg­u­la­tion, more competition.

I once wanted politi­cians involved in ICT. Hav­ing spoken to some in the Lib­eral Party on this mat­ter a few years ago, their response was “join the line of issues regard­ing policy”

Now that they have become involved; only as there is a bal­an­cing act between the votes in the bush vs. the investors in Tel­stra: recent policies and invest­ments seem to have slowed innov­a­tion and com­pet­i­tion rather than improve services.

So, I regret my thoughts on want­ing politi­cians involved. Stay out of it. Let the mar­ket decide. Do some­thing use­ful and fix the hos­pit­als. KTHXBAI.

In the 19^th and 20^th Cen­tury rail­ways moved our gold, sil­ver, lead, wool and wheat from the pro­duct­ive farms and mines to our over­seas markets.

In the 21^st Cen­tury, the two lines are not the iron lines 5ft 3in apart: they are the twis­ted cop­per pairs that con­nect our brains to the world. Brains, politi­cians. Not atoms. What is in our head is already more import­ant than atoms.

Instead of our bright­est minds tak­ing their brains and ideas to other parts of the world, we need to har­ness them here — and con­nect them to the world.

I don’t really care too much about the to-and-fro and polit­ical shen­angi­ans anymore.

Just open it up. Be brave. Let us all rise, includ­ing those rebadged PMGs, to a new world where the tyranny of dis­tance is slain.

Per­sonal Rant Over.

Thanks to some good friends I met at TechEd last week, I’ve received and installed a build of Win­dows Mobile 6 on my trusty Treo 750.  Long Zheng talked about this last week.

After a few minutes of resetup (yes, I did have a data backup) my phone has leapt into 2007.

The Treo 750 UI feels faster and more respons­ibe. Which is a way cool thing. Thanks Palm!

Hav­ing an online job I really should have no excuses to be offline.

Wifi Eth­er­net, paid or unpaid, can be a little like find­ing a needle in a needle factory.

Solu­tion: Popped into a Dick Smith and pur­chased a USB NextG Card.

Why Big­Pond? Microsoft’s mobile phone/data sup­plier is Tel­stra, and Cathye con­vinced me to do it over lunch.

Symp­toms: I could register the card and account; how­ever the IP address that was cre­ated was always a 169.254.x.x. The card was suc­cess­fully seen with the Big­Pond soft­ware 2.7.3

After a week of work­ing with the sup­plied soft­ware, includ­ing a very friendly sup­port guy at Tel­stra Big­pond, I’ve decided to search out for fur­ther info.

Whilst I ran out of time to hunt down the root cause of the issue; it seems that the Vista install at Microsoft has some ser­i­ous group policy restric­tions on net­work­ing: so it’s work­around time.

In this pro­cess of look­ing for the solu­tion, I turned off Vista’s UAC. That is a pretty big switch. Sort of like leav­ing your secur­ity alarm off when you leave home. I didn’t feel safe. UAC back on.

The card is dis­trib­uted in Aus­tralia by a com­pany called Maxon. They have a sup­port forum. 20 minutes of read­ing, and there is a work-around. The card itself maps into Win­dows as a Port, and using the nor­mal dial-up/PPP set­ting — you can just dial into the net­work and you are off.

(this post via Big­Pond NextG)

Quiet week in the ‘cottage.

Phase 1 of the de-installation of Big­pond as our ISP: Inter­node, all the way! Added ADSL via Inter­node: the highest qual­ity Aussie-owned ISP in Aus­tralia, to the home net­work. Once Tel­stra Whole­sale get their act together, the next step is 8Mbit/s. It seems that Tel­stra has not cor­rectly pro­vi­sioned their IT for ADSL resellers.

Based on the low qual­ity of cable modem inter­net in our part of Sydney, 8Mbit/s will match our so-called “up to 17MBit/s” on Big­pond Extreme. This is due to the shared band­width nature of cable.

Internode’s back­haul, or through­put to their serv­ers and to the inter­net the US, is amaz­ing. That’s why they have a 97% refer­ral rate accord­ing to CRN.

Also signed on to Node­phone, Internode’s Voice-over-IP ser­vice. Plugged in the land­line to the Bil­lion Router, and we have low Aus­tralian calls. Installed X-Lite on my Mac, and now I have a softphone.

Also took the oppor­tun­ity to increase the secur­ity on our local wire­less to WPA. Leav­ing WEP and MAC layer fil­ters in the past as they are eas­ily cracked. We don’t wish to become the local ISP for the neighborhood.

Yes, my super­fund is an investor in T3. But Bigpond’s recent com­ments as to net­work con­trol is a major con­cern: and I am vot­ing with my liquid dol­lars. Business-wise, I trust that Tel­stra man­age­ment grok the new IP/digital world ahead.

So, on the Xmas list: ADSL2+ and Node­phone Direct-in-Dial.