xfesty

06:34 pm: Truenergy continue to be awesome, too. In an earlier post I told how they'd cut us off from electricity due to an unpaid bill - which was being sent to a DIFFERENT ADDRESS.

Turns out they've been sending the gas bill to the same wrong address, too...

Then we got a ridiculously large bill (which was conveniently larger than the credit they'd given us), to then receive another letter (addressed to a different address again, but fortunately a business PO BOX) saying that they've accidentally charged us everything on the peak rates.

05:49 pm: Haven't written anything since I've had the new car.

The Evo is a whole different beast to the WRX; don't know where to begin. Probably the important things - nothing has broken (... yet), although it will occasionally make some bizarre noises - which I'm told is perfectly normal - and its handling is absolutely and stupidly amazing. I've never driven anything else quite like it.

Which worries me. The WRX had a tendency to understeer; I band-aided this via different size swaybars which made it act more neutral, but you really could feel the limits of the vehicle, how far you could push it safely.

The Evo has all this wonderful electronic gadgetry, particularly a very advanced diff system called Super-AYC which does all this crazy stuff including allowing riduclously great turn-in by regulating power to wheels - imagine it like a traction control system, but it doesn't slow down the vehicle or get in the way, instead just lets it turn in sharper, or regulates traction if in a slide.

As a result it means no evident understeer, and on inducing overseer it is incredibly easy to control.

What it means is the Evo is riduclously easy vehicle to push at very high speeds, and with minimal effort you can be pulling powerslides and other stupid things I could never get the hang of in the WRX - it makes terrible drivers feel like heros. Went to a motorkhana today and even though I was screwing up handbrake turns, and I know how I was screwing up, the car was still getting around the course pretty nicely and controlled.

Which worries me. If this thing is going to let go... it's going to let go in a pretty huge way, and there's going to be nearly no leadup warning to it occuring.

11:21 pm: Sold the WRX earlier in the week, and collected an extremely good condition black Evo IX with factory performance pack and some options tonight with about 30K on the clock.

It is getting a major service, new rotors/brakes and a re-alignment tomorrow, but hoping this will be a car with less headaches. Expect maintenance will continue to cost a small fortune, but that's the nature of these kind of cars, which I'm OK with.

Very, very different car than the Subaru.

03:28 pm: Truenergy admitted fault, surprisingly. Apparently they were sending the bills to a completely different address (wtf!).

$450 credit against my account.

Complaining does work, apparently...

edit: Apparently it was M's old address. From like 2 years ago. Good work guys.

01:48 am: Truenergy are incompetent, rude, and arrogant - suggest avoiding them.

Long story short, we haven't received a bill since we moved into our place in December; didn't really think much about it.

Power got cut off 10am Thursday morning - while I'm interstate in Sydney, and M is home with the baby. No advance notice, no knock on the door, no disconnect notice, nothing - just off.

She rang them, got the payment details, I paid immediately. Rang them back and they promised to have somebody out immediately to get the power back on again.

Long story short, after several dozen phone calls to truenergy, ETSA (local power provider), etc, each one angrier than the last, with constant promises of being called back (which we never were) and promises of an electrician coming out (who didn't), it took them almost 40 hours to restore power to the place due to screwups with their internal system and an indian callcentre that didn't give a shit.

Not only did they leave a place with a baby without power for 2 days, there's about ~$300 worth of food in the fridge/freezer that needs to be thrown out, now, as well as I run an internal business mail server there and missed some emergency emails I needed to deal with, which has led to some missed work (and therefore $$$).

Needless to say I'm going to be changing electricity companies, but anybody ever had success taking a business to small claims court over something like this? I usually let things like this pass, but the whole situation has me steaming angry considering the whole thing is a series of monumental screwups on their behalf.

12:58 am: Missed out on an awesome opportunity on the flight here -

Flight was Syd -> San Fran -> Chicago. As I was boarding the Chicago flight, United Airlines announced several times the plane was overbooked. They were offering a flight the next day, first class, with free accomodation in a 5 star hotel for the night, along with free transport to/from the hotel & a $300 voucher for flights.

Which meant I could have had a 24 hours for effectively free in another city while here, along with enough $ to probably get a flight to/from somewhere else next week.

Had to be in Chicago for existing commitments, though. D'oh!

08:50 am: I know it's said that Australia is little America, but it's crazy how alike the US feels to AU. Even NZ felt far more different. Something I've always enjoyed doing when overseas is noticing the little customary differences and trying to adjust to them, and going into shops and seeing how things differ. Everything's the bloody same - I go into a convenience store and I'm staring at more or less exactly the same brands. Shops are more or less the same, behaviour is alike, people are perhaps a tiny bit more impatient but still pleasant. Keep forgetting I'm overseas; just feels like I'm in a new state of Australia, where the cars look a little funny (although there are a LOT of european/korean/japanese cars here), drive on the wrong side of the road, and there are more American accents than usual.

Am enjoying it though regardless - just glad I didn't pick the US as the first country I visited, or I'd probably be less interested in further travel. This is certainly reminding me of my interest in different cultures - think I need to look at visiting Asia next.

Mind you, I'm not going to make any deep conclusions yet; 75% of my stay has been restricted to hotels and airports, with a little bit of suburbia, so it's hard to evaluate - the first two are the same everywhere, really :)

What is sucking, however, is the AU>US exchange rate :(

05:46 pm: Haven't posted here for a while, and I usually ramble about car shit, so here's another one:

Had some twit who couldn't drive reverse into me today. Was behind another car on a side street trying to turn onto a main rd; he wanted to cross traffic and turn right, I wanted to turn immediately left.

This guy takes off from the kerb, so I pull up to the kerb. He stops halfway across because of oncoming traffic, and just sat there, holding up oncoming traffic from the other direction - everybody starts beeping him. What does he do? Sticks his car into reverse and backs into me, without even checking in his rear vision mirror... I saw it happening almost in slow motion, beeped him madly, he took no notice, and by the time I tried to get the car into reverse gear, was too late - bang.

Thought the front would have been demolished given the speed he reversed at, but the damage is really quite minor - the licence plate holder is a bit bent, but the most of it is just some minor paint scrapes along the front bumper and a bit of my bottom bumper lip melted/dented from where his cannon exhaust (it was a corolla, lols) hit me.

I was pissed off while in the car, but calm when out of it and saw the minor damage - car still drivable, and that's what insurance is for, right? The guy (teenager) turned a bit nasty though and tried to claim that I drove into him. I explained he reversed - claimed he didn't reverse at all. I then had to point out to him he was in the intersection, and I was still on the other road... he promptly shut up then.

His girlfriend then tried to call me ridiculous for getting details to make a claim because it was only 'minor damage'. Fuck it - resprays/bumper repairs are NOT CHEAP.

Put the claim in earlier with my insurance agency, so we'll see how decent they are. They seemed nice/easy to deal with on the phone.

Annoying, though - I'm heading to the US for a fortnight on the weekend, and I had planned to get some new mods fitted when I got back (VF43, bigger TMIC, fuel pump, strut bars), ready for a hillclimb event mid-April, but that may need to wait until the bumper is fixed first. Not too keen on leaving my car at a crash repairer for 2 weeks.

07:59 pm: I've always been paranoid as hell about privacy online; avoiding social websites, using a plethora of different aliases, trying to increase the noise:signal ratio with non-nonsensical data.

Finding I'm caring less and less lately; convenience is winning. Probably not a good thing.

11:02 pm: Anybody who has been around me for a while knows that I borderline on extreme paranoia when it comes to security; I've had enough theft incidents to be wary as hell.

Last night in Perth CBD - for the first time in like, forever - I decided to leave my laptop bag in my rented car parked on the side of the road. My laptop is my primary work tool, and although most things are backed up, not everything is and I'd be pretty fecked if it got nicked.

Get back from a casual drink with a mate from the pub after a hour - his car was broken into & was attempted to be "hotwired"/stolen!

Fortunately - thank god - my car was untouched.

I've never seen a car get "hotwired" before, so it was quite interesting. The car was an early 90's Subaru Liberty. It appears all that was done was the covering around the steering wheel snapped off, the lock/key cylinder was smashed out and lying on the ground - no wires like you see in the movies.

After fudging around for ages we actually worked out that the key mechanism purely turns a little latch at the end of the lock cylinder, so we demobilized the car, shoved in a screwdriver into where the lock cylinder fits, turned it, and the car started up. The fact it was that easy is worrying!

Here's the funny bit: the demobilizer remote was left in the car RIGHT NEXT TO the ignition. The moron that broke into the car didn't even spend 5 seconds looking for it.

12:38 pm: Some of you may know of garfield minus garfield, but this (realfield) is a more amusing spin on the same idea...

05:36 pm: I'm constantly catching myself repeating things I say, typically explaining the same concept or idea twice but in different ways. I think it's a habit I've picked up from years of IT support and having to reinforce things constantly to ensure understanding. It's bloody annoying.

04:43 am: I think I scared (via proxy) the crap out of a bunch of people at a party in Adelaide tonight. Driving to a party in my WRX (which now has a louder exhaust but is still quiet compared to most, which I didn't think was drawing much attention) I overshot the place I was meant to be at, so I swung back around a roundabout to be pulled over by a cop car for a 'random drug test'. Right in front of the party - police lights/siren and all :)

This was in a deserted back street very early in the night and I wasn't speeding - I can understand police being proactive on NYE but this definitely seemed a little odd.

They had a look over the car, asked if it has a turbo timer, asked about the GPS system I had installed, etc, and the test results took a while to come back so I had a chat to them. They were both perfectly pleasant about it all, I certainly wasn't in the wrong & the car is completely legal, but they ended up admitting that they were following me for a while after a different cop had radioed them that there was a WRX in the area.

I've always been left alone in Victoria, and was under the false pretense they'd leave a stock looking car alone. Oh well, fun - probably should expect more of this :-(

11:01 am:

07:21 pm: To offset all my bitching here lately, I present a kitten:

07:12 pm: Wrote to Citymove and complained about the total move time/charge/damage, explaining that I'm also moving interstate soon.

They've offered me a $50 voucher off on my next move.

Nice to see they care... not!

08:44 pm: Do NOT use Citymove (www.citymove.com.au) - bad experience, not recommended.

When moving house, I've always used a truck and a willing friend - figured I'd try out a moving company - for $55/half hour including two men and a truck, and considering I was only moving stuff 5kms down the road, why not.

First of all - before they got to my house, the movers called me to let me know they'd be 15 minutes away. I thought that was a nice touch until I saw they charged me $2 for a 'courtesy call' on my invoice.

The company sent out two nice but barely skilled movers who took over 2 hours to pack my gear into the truck (and had issues working out how to carry some stuff down the stairs, and started scraping tables/washing machines/etc over the floors [no damage, fortunately]. I ended up helping), and then charged me for shit like "travel time to/from premises". Total time 4 hours.

My housemate moved stuff a bit further out than I did through a different company, who were apparently competent movers and cheaper - total of $180.

My total - $488.50.

I was going to use them to relocate gear out of storage and to the final house once I've got it, but bugger that.

My relocation from Adelaide to Melbourne 2 years ago cost me $400 total through a different company, and I had MORE gear then.

edit: I seem to only be using my LJ for bitch sessions. Need to stop doing this! :)

12:57 pm: Picked up a pair of Sony Fontopia MDR-EX90's today after having used relatively average earphones for about a year; I've forgotten how much more enjoyable music is with decent reproductive gear. Worrying, really!

03:03 pm: Seriously, is there anything Microsoft ISN'T 'borrowing' from Apple?

I thought some of the changes in Vista were blatantly 'borrowed', but looks like they're replacing the taskbar with an OS X like dock in Windows 7:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipg6ltIZRw0&feature=related

Innovation: We let the other suckers do it.

04:30 pm: Don't you hate it when you're re-researching something and you Google for it, and the top result is a post you've made somewhere ages back?

(Actually, maybe this says a lot for my memory lately...!)