ginger’s thoughts

…because of your outstanding contributions to Australia’s computing sector, but haven’t had the chance to put yourself out there? Or you have a friend who really deserves an award for his excellent work? Here’s your chance.

This year’s NSW State Pearcey Award is open for applications and nominations. It is one of the only Australian awards that singles out individuals and their contribution to the Australian ICT profession early in their career (where “early” is used rather flexibly to mean anyone who has not yet reached the end of their career).

If you have made any outstanding technical innovations or created novel commercial businesses in IT in NSW, you should consider sending in your CV.

Previous award winners can be seen here. There are some excellent people - even some from the open source community. In 2006, James Dalziel of MELCOE won the award. Jeff and Pia Waugh won last year. And I was myself highly commended in 2006 for the Annodex work we did at CSIRO.

You’ll need to send in the completed nomination form and your CV before the end of August. Good luck!

I don’t usually complain about companies and their sales approach, since I know how hard it is to sell things. But today I had a house call by a Telstra person and his sales practice was so dodgy - it’s just not something I would have expected by such a respected company as Telstra.

He came with a clipboard, had a name tag, and was on the verge of running away again when I got to the door - he really made the impression of a busy technician and took notes in his clipboard while we were talking.

He asked me whether I was with Telstra and I said no. He further asked who my phone line was with and I said iiNet. He then asked whether iiNet was looking after our physical phone line connection and I said probably no, but rather that it still belonged to Telstra - I found that a strange question to be asked by a technician who should really know, but then he might be new from India and not know everything yet.

He then said that in this case his information would be interesting for me and said that on Monday and Tuesday between 9am and 5pm Telstra would be undertaking work on the phone cables in my street and that I would be without connection, both Internet and Phone. I said ok, if it cannot be helped and thought that was it.

But that wasn’t it. Out of seemingly personal curiosity, almost as if he was making a decision for his own personal home, he asked how I was going with iiNet. I said good. He asked how much I was paying and how many phone calls that would include. I stated the rough amount and that my phone charges were really low and that amount almost covered all my phone calls and Internet connection. He then went on asking how much bandwidth I had. I stated the summary of peak and off-peak bandwidth to which he asked how much was peak and how much was off-peak. At this point I was getting slightly annoyed, since he could as well look up all these details on the Internet and really doesn’t need to get them from me.

But then came the really weird part. He then said that with this bandwidth I could barely surf the Internet and my phone line would be really crappy. He then started trying to sell me a Telstra ADSL service. This is where I got really annoyed and almost loud. I said that I knew what I was doing and that for what I am getting from iiNet I would have to pay 10 times as much with Telstra and that under no circumstances would I switch back to Telstra services.

He seemed to understand that he wasn’t going to sell me any phone or Internet services today, so he switched topic: what about a Foxtel account then? I said no thank you and good bye and closed the door.

So, now, I am actually wondering whether his initial statement that our street will have an outage on Monday and Tuesday is actually correct or whether that was just a way to get his foot in the door. I am really pissed off with Telstra for such dodgy sales practices. Unfortunately, their complaints department does not answer calls on a weekend and their technical department was not willing to confirm an outage on Monday and Tuesday since I am not a Telstra customer.

Telstra: I really wished your sales people would play fairly in the market. I could see so many neighbours talking to your sales guy and considering his offers that I almost felt like going over and uncovering his lies. He is making false claims about other Network’s services, he is making false claims about technical details and he is trying to open the door with a possibly false claim on a technical outage. Plus: I have to wait until Monday before I can tell you about it. How much worse can it get?

I have spent this weekend giving my Blog a work-over and extending the page set about myself - something I have been putting off for 5 years!

I now have a proper Website for Gingertech and I finally have the list of my publications up.

I have quite an extensive list of publications, so have been wondering for a while how to publish them such that it will be easy to manage. I have used a nice little Wordpress plugin called “List Subpages” to get the hierarchical set of pages onto the site in a nicely structured way. I’m actually missing a RSS feed of these pages, but that’s not a major problem. I’m happy with what this provides for now - it’s a good start. It will make those people happy that have been bugging me for my publications and to whom my sad reply has always been to send them an extract of my CV.

I still need to add some of the abstracts of the publications into the posts, and complete the links to where you can download them. More work for further weekends. This is a good start for now and I am happy with it.

When I was a child, my dad used to take me to classic music concerts - piano concerts, cello concerts and the like. I really loved the music but hated having to sit still for so long. I got used to the tradition in classic music concerts to sit still on your chair in an orderly fashion and try not to sneeze or in any other way disrupt the dignified performance.

As a teenager, I loved going to rock and pop concerts, when they came anywhere close to my home town (which was not very often, since I grew up on the German countryside). I loved the party that a concert represents, with drinks and dancing and screaming and generally being wild.

But it seems that the Rock stars of my time have grown old and their concerts have turned into “classical music”.

I recently went to a Rolling Stones concert in Homebush and last night to an Eric Clapton concert in the Entertainment Centre. Both times , I sat in a far away corner from centre stage and was not able to see much of the stars. I still enjoyed their great music.

In last night’s concert, I dared get up and stand in one of the large hallways that connect the rangs - and of course I started to dance, ’cause that’s what Eric Clapton music does to me! To my enormous disappointment, I was asked by some dorky security guard to get back to my seat.

What bad can a little dance do? Why is it not allowed to have fun at a Rock concert of old stars? It gave me 100 times the enjoyment of the music in comparison to being nailed down in a seat! And I’m sure, if more people were allowed to show their joy this way, the musician would also have more fun in the concert. To me, it seemed like Eric was rather disappointed with the Sydney crowd. Well NO FU….. WONDER!

I think, in future I will stick to the concerts of younger and local musicians and crowds - such as Missy Higgins or Xavier Rudd, where you are actually encouraged to enjoy the music with your full conscience and body. Those classic music concerts just made me feel old and joyless…

…and it’s about time, they say.

Expect comments on the world of digital media, the world of free and open source software, and visions of the future here.

I’m not going to out me here personally. If you want to know what I’ve been up to over the last weekend - come and visit me, give me a call or grab me on irc. I like personal contact.