There’s seems to be a lot of controversy flying (sorry, that’s a bad pun even by my standards) around the grounding of most of Europe’s aircraft fleet following the eruption of an unpronounceable volcano. Sheesh.
Sunday 25th April 2010
Friday 23rd April 2010
I know I’ve been saying this repeatedly for years now, but it seems just when Facebook does something interesting, they take two steps back in privacy in the same pen stroke. I’m saving my worrying out loud about Facebook’s new Like button for another post, this one has to do with (yet another!) disturbing policy change.
Wednesday 27th January 2010
There has been more talk about the rumoured Apple iTablet / iSlate / iPad / iThingy than the second coming of a non existant deity or a certain iTelephone device. There’s probably little more I could add that hasn’t already been said, but I’m going to have fun doing it anyway. As a matter of disclosure, some of my computers are Macs and I have an iPhone.
Why did I put a picture of an old MacBook Pro and not the current one? Because it’s the venerable Apple companion I have, albeit with Snow Leopard now! Isn’t that sweet? No, it’s because there aren’t any photos of a darn Apple tablet yet! The Bird is The Word! But I digress (no, really?).
Monday 23rd November 2009
It seems to be another example of an idea that everyone else seems to favour but I find worrying; even more jarring it’s perhaps the first time I’ve really disagreed with Om Malik (of whom I’m a huge fan) about something! Allegedly some people over at Google are exploring the option of including the speed of pages as a metric for a site’s PageRank.
Saturday 14th November 2009
Having installed Fedora 11 alongside FreeBSD on my ThinkPad X40 and deciding I liked it, I went ahead this evening and installed the current beta release of Fedora 12. So far I’m really impressed, but one thing is worrying.
Monday 02nd November 2009
As I said with the Ghostery Firefox extension back in May (Ghostery Mozilla Firefox extension review), it bowls me over when I go to some sites to see just how much sneaky crap is going on behind the scenes, and how most people simply have no idea. With NoScript, I’m starting to see the same thing, and it’s rapidly getting much worse.
Monday 24th August 2009
When it comes to simple video editing on the Mac, iMovie HD that came bundled with iLife 06 is still the best in my opinion. The new iMovie versions that came out with the subsequent versions of iLife were a huge step backwards, but for small projects Final Cut Express is overkill and far too expensive to justify. Even though I use iLife 08 for other applications, I still have my copy of iLife 06 just for the older version of iMovie. iUsed a lot of iWords in that sentence iThink.
Problem is, its as unreliable as Firefox 3.5 which means you need to remember to constantly save. Guess it’s a good thing to get into the habit of doing, but it means when you haven’t saved for a few minutes after positioning frames perfectly in the timeline (which neither iMovie 07 and 08 have) you might have to do it all again. Command+S is my friend!
Aside from this I’m okay with my current setup, my original generation MacBook Pro has a shot FireWire port but I’m able to use an ExpressCard to get FireWire functionality back, and iMovie HD still runs on Leopard just fine. I guess I’m just a little paranoid that any one of these tenuous things could fail and I’ll be up an electronic creek without a paddle.
Tuesday 12th May 2009
Kallen doesn’t like predatory mail credit card applications either!
As I’ve previously blogged about here on several occasions under the economics category, when I moved back to Australia on a part time basis to study, I decided to go with a credit union instead of a bank. My decision was based on my previously poor experiences with banks such as the long queues at branches where half the teller desks are closed; what I consider exorbitant fees; having to prove I’m a student every five minutes to keep my rates down; being bullied into purchasing services I don’t want or need; I could go on. I also take issue with some of their business practises such as predatory lending and their seemingly indifferent view to consumer rights.
While I still stand by my decision, the honeymoon period with credit unions for me is now officially over thanks to a personally addressed letter from the Australian Central Credit Union I received this morning. Inside was a letter explaining how I can use balance transfers to lower my interest repayments along with a “fast track” application form to apply for one of their MasterCard plastics.
Financial regulations in Australia are some of the strictest in the developed world, but as far as I know there’s no law against sending people letters like this which I consider akin to predatory lending. Encouraging people to take advantage of lower interest rates on credit transfers only to crank up the interest rates to the same or higher than the debtor had before reeks of misinformation at best and exploitation at worst.
What also worries me about this is what criteria they used to send these credit card application forms. I still use my bank account in Singapore for most tasks, relegating my credit union account here in Australia for small purchases and for paying bills. If I were a responsible financial institution I wouldn’t offer to lend someone like me money in this form if I had the knowledge that they only had this amount of money in their accounts.
To play Devil’s advocate, on the application form they do ask for employment and income details, but my point above still stands. The Australian Central Credit Union knew my balance and transaction history, and they offered me an application for credit.
It’s reckless lending behaviour like this that was part of the reason for the current financial crisis. If I get time I’ll be writing a brief letter to the Australian Central Credit Union telling them that I’ll be keeping my account with them because their service is still exemplary especially when compared to dealing with banks, but that I’m disappointed with their behaviour and hope they reconsider sending out such material to people in the future.
