So a lot has happened over the past two weeks or so, I was meaning to blog about it but it turned into a long-winded piece of crap that I don’t think anybody would appreciate to read. Hopefully this post doesn’t end up in the trash like the previous two.

To start off the break I went to watch Transformers 2, worst movie I’ve seen in a while. Some movies are just plain stupid so I don’t bother complaining about it, but this movie was a 200 million dollar blockbuster which made no sense and to be honest was just a bunch of senseless explosions whilst you have some hot chick in tight white pants running across the arid Sahara, she doesn’t get a single scratch on her whilst her boyfriend ends up having half his face ripped to shreds.

It was followed by Jase’s 20th Surprise Bday Party. Highlights include being pecked on the cheek by Jase, gossiping like a bunch of 12 year old school girls (no shame) and getting a 5-shot Long Island Ice Tea. Yes, kids, 5 shots…not the standard 5 half-shots, 5 full-shots. The bartender, instead of making 4 drinks, made 2 drinks which had the alcohol content of 4. Normally, after you put in the coke the drink turns into a slightly cokey colour…ours remained white. It was great though! It was a pretty good hit and made everything more entertaining.

I then had a Jay Chou concert. Half the Asian population was there along with 2 white chicks, 1 white guy and an Indian. Sam reckons they were lost. Okay…yes…the fans are loyal, gave Jay Chou lots of “face”, but people can you please be more active? They handed out these blow up sticks which you’re meant to hit together to create noise. I guess Asians aren’t loud enough so they need assistance? Come on guys. Nobody was moving, nobody was jumping. Look. The concert was great but I wasn’t tired from the concert, I was tired from standing. Experience from standing is probably not different to sitting. I originally was in the second row but I had to go pick up Diana so we ended up in the back. My original plan was to push in-front but that failed…horribly. Nobody was moving! It’s like as if they all decided to do some firm Kung Fu stance. I eventually crawled to the back and stood next to some white chicks. I don’t know why they were there but they seemed interested in the concert. Overall, it was pretty good concert, just wished that people moved a bit more. I mean god…this one guy was voice recording the concert on his iphone. The quality would be horrendously crap and in any other concert the crowd would have pushed him so hard he would have dropped his beloved iphone.

I also went to Perisher from 5th to 8th. It’s actually colder in Sydney than it was “in the mountains” mainly due to the fact that I wore a lot more. On our way there we were playing “I spy”, twas awesome. We had words such as telegraph post, sky, blue and weed. We also played 20 questions which was slightly more amusing. Poor Kelvin was sick for majority of the stay and only went boarding on the second last day. God snowboarding was hard. I had two major stacks. One going down Village 8 and just face-palmed the snow. I spent a good two minutes on the snow going “Fuck…fuck…holy fuck that hurts…fuck”. I also knocked my head on the snow after trying to turn from the edge to my heel, had problem lifting my head out of bed the next day. Honestly, I don’t think I would have survived another day of boarding. It was just too ownage. Having said that, it was a great experience and I won’t mind doing it again.

The next day after getting back from snows a package arrived! My new iphone 3g s! Excellent. However, since it was delivered the box was quite owned and I later found out that the iphone itself is dented. The screen dents into the phone. I scheduled a genuisbar appointment and managed to get the phone replaced, thus bringing the number of iphones owned by me to 5. I also listed my iphone up for sale. Today it was finally sold for $561.97 + $20 p/h. Subtracting ebay and paypal charges it ends up being $549.38.

Lets do some calculations:

Postage for new iphone: $9
Contract termination: $438
Remaining iPhone payments: $144

Total: $591
Difference: $41.62

I paid $41.62 for the new iphone 3g s. Pro Asian skills I must say. Pro Asian skills.

There’s also some other nitty gritty stuff that I want to touch on but I think I should just leave it here and save it for the next post, stay tuned I guess…although whenever I say that I don’t end up posting a follow up >.>

So I made like 5 calls to Optus today. Got transferred here and there but eventually I managed to get what I want.

Termination fee is $730 for the first 12 months regardless, after the first 12 months it’s a percentage. The termination fee is calculated based on the plan you FIRST signed up with. Doesn’t matter if you upgrade it’ll still be the same.

So I thought, hang on then can’t I sign up for the $19 cap and then upgrade to $49 with a much lower termination fee? Well, it seems they have that loophole covered. You can do that but…you’ll end up paying for the handset payments from the $19 cap instead of the $49 cap, which will turn out to be a lot higher overall. Bastards!

But in the end, I weighed my options and decided to just upgrade. It’ll cost me $438 to terminate my contract (after the 40% discount) and an addition $156 worth of handset repayments, which adds up to around $594, which should be around the same price that I can sell my iphone 3g for.

To finish off I saw the most hilarious tweet today. Kevin Rudd tweeted “Ok. So its only a couple of hours to go before I’m on Rove. With Bruno! Any ideas guys about how I can get out of this one?” and then Rove replies with “Send a fake email?”. Brilliant.

I used to “forum” regularly on neowin.net but then I stopped. It was mainly to do with the fact that I switched over to linux and neowin is a predominantly “windows” community (despite the fact that they have their own disgusting flavour of linux that is based on Ubuntu). Another reason was that I’m easily trolled. Yes I’ve said it, happy JP (if you’re even reading this)?

I decided to be more “active” in this other community. I’ve had an account since ‘04 but haven’t posted in like 4 years. Only started to post recently and I got into these situations pretty quickly.

I think the key to “living” online is to just not care. Treat everybody’s comment as dirt and just troll back. That’s how you get dogshit communities like “bored aussie”. It’s impossible to have a decent online community that’s troll-free. Even on WebCT you have incredibly douchy people and this is a place where your full name is displayed publicly.

But I guess you just have to follow everything up with the word “lol” and everything is cool right?

…right?

So I’m thinking of upgrading my iphone 3g to the new 3g s. Some of you may be thinking “what’s the point? The new phone isn’t that much better and the current 3g is fine”.

True. All so true.

But, let’s look at it from another perspective. How much would a first generation iphone fetch these days? $200 bucks? Max?

How much would a 3g fetch? Well a used unlocked iphone 3g fetches around $600 on ebay.

Optus is offering to discount 40% off the upgrade fee if I decide to upgrade. After several phone calls to Optus nobody seems to know how much I’m meant to be charged to upgrade. Currently I’m on the $49 cap. I have 12 months left. So I only have to pay 49 * 12 = $588. Given the 40% discount that ends up being $352.80. Now I also have to pay another 12 months worth of handset payments which equate to $144 for a total of $496.80 in order to upgrade.

If I can sell my phone for $600, it’s the equivalent of being paid $100 to trade my iphone 3g for the iphone 3g s!

It’ll be even better if they charge me based on my original $39 plan in which then it’ll only cost $424.80 to upgrade. It’s starting to sound better and better

So there you go, from a purely economical standpoint, I should upgrade my phone. I just need to visit an optus store and see how much I can cut down the upgrade costs to

Today I will be releasing the Release Candidate of my Chatlog to Email Converter Plus!

I added “Plus!” as it is designed for Messenger Plus! chatlogs.

It now supports every form of Messenger chatlogs text or html and also has emoticon support.

Requirements:

• Python 2.6 (preferable, 2.5 should also work but untested)
• Beautiful Soup
• Mozilla Thunderbird

Wishlist:

• Remove Thunderbird requirement and support direct upload to specified imap server

Download:

I’ve setup a google code project for my script. Yes it’s open source!!!

Download Script

Instructions for use:

1. Place all your chatlogs inside one folder
2. Place my script within the same folder (make sure the folder does not contain any files apart from chatlogs or images)
3. Open up a command window inside that folder
4. Type “python chatlog2email.py -p -t” to convert all plain text and html chatlogs to mime format (type python chatlog2email.py –help for advanced usage)
5. Once it’s done you shold see a file called “Chatlogs”  move that file to <Path to thunderbird preferences>\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\Mail\Local Folders
6. Open up Thunderbird and drag drop the chatlogs to an email account that supports imap

Easy!

If you have any problems either post here or file a bug report on google code.

If you found this useful, drop a comment or send me an email. It makes me happy

Over the years you will find that your contact list gets cluttered. You’ve deleted people, blocked people or even both. Maybe others have deleted you, blocked you or both. For the people that have blocked or deleted you…why bother keeping them on your contact list?

Why not delete them? But then how do you tell who’s actually blocked and/or deleted you?

I present Noroom’s ListCleaner. I’ve had this app for many years now, although never bothered to share it with anybody. The original author no longer supports it, I would love to see it ported to a nice .net application or even the features incorporated into Messenger Plus! Live. Maybe I can write a script for it

Here’s the description from the readme.

“Often, when u sign in to Messenger, the server sends a list with containing users who have permission to see you online, who do not have permission, who have you on their contact list, and who you have on yours. Sometimes you delete some users, and people delete you from their list, too. Even though they don’t have you on their list anymore, their email will stay on the list of people who can see you online. Why allow them to see you online, if they don’t have you on their list anymore? It is pointless to give them persmission to see your status when they don’t have the ability to do so. Now, let’s say you block someone and then delete that user from your list. Imagine that the person you blocked also deletes you. That person’s email will stay in your block list, even though it is not likely they will talk to you, because you are not on their contact list anymore.”

All you have to do is download the app and login with your WLM account. The app will then collate all the people that you can delete. Simple!

I know this isn’t much of a tutorial but it’s something that I thought people would find useful. I bet most people would be quite surprised at the results.

Too bad it’s not opensource, I would love to take a quick look under the hood of that application.

In case you missed the download link above here it is again.

DOWNLOAD

I’ve talked about how fail Optus is before, this will be another one of those rants.

Well, Optus released pricing and release dates for the upcoming iPhone 3GS but it didn’t say anything about upgrading from an existing iPhone plan. So I decided to call them up instead.

I was greeted by the usual computer. My question is this…why is it that Optus have 5 different numbers registered for different departments but they all get redirected to the same computer? I mean, I dialed the number for sales why the hell should I go through the process of telling the computer…again…that my enquiry is about sales?

So I was greeted by a technician called “Roy”. He sounded Aussie so I was rather relieved. I explained to him my enquiry, once I stopped talking, it was obvious that he wasn’t Aussie at all. Here’s my theory…these techs from India probably practices an hour each day on how to say “Hi this is the Optus Sales department, my name is <blah>. How can I help you?” in an Aussie accent just to trip me out. I know you’re trying to make the customer experience better…but you’re really not.

Anyway, the conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, I’m John and I would like to make sure enquiries about the upcoming iPhone 3GS
Tech: mhmm
Me: I’m just wondering if there are any plans to upgrade to the new iPhone 3GS for existing iPhone 3G customers?
Tech: Yes there is, it’s already on the website. The website contains all the plans and prices.
Me: Yes, I know…I’m asking if there are any plans for existing iPhone owners which is not on the website.
Tech: You can already upgrade your phone. You just have to plug it in and then download the latest version.
Me: Okay sorry, I meant the iPhone 3GS not the software.
Tech: Yes…the iPhone 3GS is the software.
Me:  (At this point I start laughing) Nonono, 3GS is the physical phone…not software
Tech: If you want to upgrade to another phone you have to wait until your contract ends
Me: Okay…that’s all I wanted to know
Tech: If you want to upgrade your iPhone you can do that already
Me: (Laughs again) Yes, I’ve done it already, anywho…thanks for your time, bye.

Hilariously…within 2 hours of making that call I got sent an email from Optus regarding the new iphone. It read…

Existing Customers
If you are an existing Optus customer, and you want a New Apple iPhone 3G S, make sure you open the emails we send as there is a special offer just for you coming soon.

Thanks Optus.

I wrote my first MP!L script last night. Took me around 2 hours. Downloaded the documentation, created my first hello world script…again, created a test gui window, played around with toasts and what not. I was testing everything using Francis. Quite hilarious.

Well I finished the script at around 12:30am. It was quite amazing. I didn’t think it would be that easy.

The script basically syncs your display pic with your gravatar account. It does this when you sign into WLM. You can also manually evoke the sync option by typing “/gsync” whilst in a chat.

If you have any problems using it you can either comment here or post a reply here

Download Gravatar Sync!!!

I installed a Facebook Connect plugin so now people can connect using Facebook and post up comment. Only problem is that my previous theme breaks with the plugin. I also realised it fails at handling “replies”. E.g. when you reply using the old theme, it doesn’t bother nesting the comment but rather just links back to the first comment. With the current theme, facebook connect plugin doesn’t break and comments are now nested. I wish I had the skills the create my own theme. I also decided to get rid of the “Share and enjoy” crap.

So even though you can’t “like” this blog Ben, you can at least publish the fact that you comented on Facebook .

Edit: I inadvertently boosted my page views to 147…which beat my record of 145. This was due to testing my site whilst not logged in. Pageviews are not recorded if I’m logged in.

So I was walking home today after a rather unexpected QQ exam. I was thinking why does our justice system support “emotions”. Maybe you law students can explain it to me.

For example, when a person commits murder and shows remorse why would his/her sentence be shorter or less harsh than someone that didn’t show remorse? You still killed someone, doesn’t matter if you show remorse now…that person is still dead.

By the same premise, if the victim’s family showed outrage then shouldn’t the murderer get a higher sentence simply because the family members were VERY VERY angry?

Makes no sense to me.

So yes, today was my AI exam. Well, for the most part I didn’t understand a lot of the concepts. Getting simple questions wrong, but then again, I got couple of harder questions right. Though I’m sure if were to come back to it in the future I might understand it a lot better.

2 exams down and 2 more to go. I purchased an iphone/ipod charger, cause I left my official apple charger in Canberra, I haven’t been bothered following it up and they haven’t bothered replying to me. The charger works pretty well and it only cost me $10 bucks. How long it’ll last is a different problem and it certainly doesn’t look as nice compare to the official charger. It does it’s job.

I also bought a battery charger for a Canon IXY 55 that my mum found. It’s a pretty old camera, only 5mp, in somewhat good condition. I bought the charger for $30. Going to charge the batteries and see if it still works. If it’s decent I might put off buying my own camera. If it’s crappy, I might ebay it or give it to my parents and ebay an even older Olympus Camera.

I’ll probably bludge for the rest of the day. Too depressed to do any work. I collected my AI assignment as well. Apparently by bi-directional search wasn’t working. I beg to differ. But I wasn’t in a mood to complain and if that 1.5% is the difference between a C/D (yes I’ve given up prospects of HD) then I will QQ so hard.

Ontop of everything, yesterday I owned my headset.

My leg got caught, I tripped and yeah…rest is self explainatory.