Best Home Phone Plan & Telstra

General, Hardware

For a very long time, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about using Telstra for virtually anything to do with home phones, mobile phones or internet. My distaste for Telstra started back in the late 90’s when there was little to no competition in most markets that Telstra dealt in with the public and they were, in a manner of speaking, profiteering on the Australian consumer – who ironically are the same tax paying citizens who provided them the infrastructure; I digress.

When moving into our current place in Maudsland on the Gold Coast, Claire & I thought it was about time that we broke the mould so went looking around for the best home phone plan available at the time. In the end, we chose AAPT and their now discontinued $29/month plus line rental cap. It was a great plan, offering much more value than the sticker price and we thought it’d work for us as we used our mobiles so much. It wasn’t long before we were consistently using over the cap and increased it. The increased cap lasted quite some time, however since Hugo has been with it – we’re striding past the $120/m included value.

Investigating the best home phone deals available on the market again last week and I was surprised by the change. Most of the major telephone carriers are offering some sort of a capped deal, popularised by the mobile phone market in the last few years. The major guys had lots of great deals, some of their capped plans were quite impressive:

  • Optus Home Super Cap, $49.95/m includes $300 worth of calls
  • Optus Home Mega Cap, $89.95/m includes $500 worth of calls
  • AAPT, $103.95/m includes $200 worth of calls
  • iPrimus Home Choice 74, $74/m includes $120 worth of calls
  • iPrimus Home Choice 104, $104/m includes $250 worth of calls

Not wanting to spend the earth on our home phone plan, I went looking for something that gave Claire & I the flexibility but managed to save us some cash as well. The two Optus plans were fantastic, however they are not available Australia wide and were ruled out. AAPT and both the iPrimus deals, while they’d save us some money per month required lengthy contracts or the included value wasn’t as good as it could have been.

I went to the Telstra site, mainly to make sure I wasn’t missing out on something but expected every other mainstream phone company to beat them but was surprised to find that they were now offering a number of good packages. After comparing their plans with others available, the value of the Telstra Homeline Ultimate was hard to pass up at $89.90/m which included:

  • Unlimited Local calls
  • Unlimited STD calls
  • Telephone line rental
  • MessageBank,
  • 3-way chat
  • Call return
  • Call Back
  • Calling number display

Gold Coast Beach Weddings Are Spectacular

General, Travel

Phil & Fiona Paraskevas Gold Coast beach wedding on the 29th May 2009Last Friday Claire, Hugo & I attended our first beach wedding. Not having attended a beach wedding before, we were quite excited to see how it all turned out and it didn’t disappoint. After experiencing a Gold Coast beach wedding, I’m quite sure that Gold Coast beaches would rival any in the world for a spectactular venue with kilometers of golden sand and clear water.

We arrived at Currumbin Beach at about 10:00AM, found a park and walked briskly down to where the wedding venue was – as it took a little longer to get there than expected compounded by a wrong turn! I haven’t taken the pram onto loose sand before but with hard tyres it didn’t fair all that well so I parked the pram at the top of the beach. The entrance to the beach itself was down a relatively steep section of sand to get to the flatter section where the wedding ceremony as going to be held. While walking down it, I was actually thinking to myself that I hope noone slipped in the sand – good fortune prevailed and there were no accidents.

Gold Coast beach wedding view from Coolangatta on the 29th May 2009A couple things that were fantastic about the beach wedding, was that it had a magnificent outlook over the beautiful beaches on the Gold Coast and it was very intimate with about 20 guests. I always associated weddings with men in black suits dressed up to the nines and the women in beautiful gowns. It came as a small but funny surprise when the groom arrived in a slightly casual suit, with classy looking black thongs in place of black leather dress shoes! Likewise, instead of the bride wearing a flowing gown that would have dragged over the sand, it was ankle length and wore fancy sandles in leiu of high heels.

Ceremonies at weddings tend to vary wildly, some are short and to the point while others are long winded and drawn out. This particular beach wedding was the former, taking about 15 minutes from start to finish. It was incredible to have the ocean literally 20 meters away from where everyone was standing, with the waves crashing in the background. The only downside, if you can call it that, was that there was just enough noise from the ocean that it made it difficult to hear the celebrant in a few points but it didn’t last long.

I now know what the fuss is about regarding beach weddings, they aren’t for everyone but if they are – they are spectacular.

Dice-O-Matic, The Ultimate Dice Rolling Machine

Hardware, Programming, Videos

Generating random numbers in software has historically been a fine art. Many companies and individuals have tried to generate truly random numbers in software and failed, some of which have failed in such a grandiose fashion it has costed business millions of dollars.

Games By Email required a dice rolling system for numerous online games. After trying various software implementations, some of his users analysed the dice rolling system and were convinced it wasn’t random enough. To put his clients mind as ease, he decided that the only real way to fix the problem was to roll real dice – not generate the dice rolls in software.

Meet the Dice-O-Matic Mark II, a 7 foot tall, 104 pound dice eating month which generates 1.3 million rolls per day! The Dice-O-Matic uses a combination of standard hardware such a bike chain, sprockets and electrical equipment which is coupled with some custom Microsoft .NET software to read photo taken of the dice after the roll to analyse what the values where – completely kick arse.

If you’re having problems viewing the above video, watch the Dice-O-Matic Mark II on YouTube directly.

Offline “Home Business Opportunity” Spam

Advertising, Websites

For the last six months, as I travel around the Gold Coast I keep seeing various bits of advertising at intersections and traffic lights. The advertising is normally stuck or pinned against the light post in the middle of the road, such that the driver can easily see it when stopped at the lights.

When I first came across the advertising, I thought it was very creative. Instead of bothering with professionally printed signs, they were hand written using a wide tipped Nikko – black writing on a plain white plastic cardboard. The sign said something to the effect of ‘executive income from home, phone x or visit y’.

It wasn’t long before I started seeing more and more of these little advertising boards, stuck up at intersections all over the Gold Coast – so one day I thought I might as well check out what they are going on about. Shortly after visiting the site in question, I realise they aren’t selling anything specifically – but are offering business coaching. Sounds like a good idea to me, a little further reading and the business coaching they are offering is based on the magic of the stupidly cult popular “The Secret”. At that point, I began to become disinterested in anything they had to offer; sorry to say it but willing your home business to grow and earn you six and seven figure sums of money isn’t going to happen – no matter how far you put the good vibes out into the world.

Recently, more and more of these types of banners have shown up over the Gold Coast – except now they are varying in style – some printed professionally, some hand written and so on. The web site addresses being promoted are different, however there is a common theme – all pushing the home business opportunity and executive six figure plus income from home.

Further investigation shows that the web sites are strangely similar – the same cookie cutter style sites, but with different people telling you how their home business opportunity will change your world forever. Lots of personal photographs of the person in question around the world, all inferring that it was a derivative of the power of awesome service. That lead me to find out where the cookie cutter sites are coming from, the same business in each case. Throwing their web site address into Google returned huge volumes of results and looking through the URL’s of the sites, you could easily spot a common theme.

Looking into their business further and it would appear there are a lot of unhappy people getting around the internet about them. They are embroiled in a huge scam, how it works I’m not quite sure but I’m guessing it involves duping a client into believing that willing their business to grow through positive thinking and good vibrations will work, all of which can be your for a tidy sum of money.

I’m wondering how many people on the Gold Coast have seen their guerrilla advertising and followed through?

Who Said Kevin Rudd Doesn’t Have A Sense Of Humour

Humour

For those not aware, the Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd is an active Twitter user. That might come as a surprise to most, however with the better part of 44,000 people following his updates – he is gaining popularity all the time.

Today Kevin was at the Southern Cross Station in Melbourne investigating first hand what impact Federal funding has had on the facility and was, not surprisingly impressed with the improvements. While there, he tried to conduct an interview – which wasn’t as successful as it could have been due to location and timing:

Ever tried to do a press conference at Southern Cross station and compete with a locomotive for the microphone? Don’t try. Locos 1. Me 0.

I find little quips of information like that quite refreshing from our Prime Minister. For a long time, I’ve always considered our Prime Minsters to be all business and no play kind of men. Having Kevin Rudd write things like that really does remind me that he is just an ordinary bloke doing a job.