Arrival

Well I have arrived in the UK, flights were a bit of a drag, but then they always are. The luggage got stuck on the plane and it took them almost an hour to get it out, so that, combined with the fact that the plane was late arriving meant that I actually got out of heathrow about 2 hours later than I should have. Not happy!

Airport security at heathrow was, well, non existant, which was a surprise, I expected a lot of guards everywhere. Passport checks were incredibly lax. They just looked at my photo, looked at me, then let you through. Its a bit strange when you are used to proper passport checking. Still I cant complain, its better than tight security I guess.

I managed to sign up with Freeserve as my Internet provider, 9.99 pounds a month for the first 3 months, then 14.99 a month after than, so all is good there, connecting was easy, though they try and get you to install everything automatically using windows internet connection settings (.ics) files. No thank you! I dont want my ISP taking over everything with their own settings. Thankfully .ics files are text so you can just read inside and set everything up yourself.

Now its time to look for a place to stay, Have been browsing property rental websites, mainly FindAProperty.com. Its definately a bit strange looking for rentals online, it doesnt feel right, so its time to make some appointments to see some properties this weekend.

No pictures yet. I will go for a walk this afternoon and take some.

Wireless Access Connection Process

This is pretty cool, here is the process I had to go through to connect to the hotspot.

1. Enable my wireless adaptor
2. Let it find the hotspot, Its a telstra hotspot.
3. Fire up your browser, you will be taken to the Telstra WiFi access point loigin page.
4. Enter details about how you wnt to pay. If you have a Telstra mobile you can use that as access.
5. An SMS is sent to your telstra mobile, with a token number
6. Enter the token number into the browser form
7. You are authenticated, full internet access!

I sorta expected it to be free-for-all, but I can understand why its not. At least the registration process was incredibly simple.

Perth Airport, First Wireless Blog

Well I am waiting in the departure lounge of Perth Airport, laptop in lap, connected to my first wireless hotspot. I wasn't really expecting to find a hotspot here at Perth Airport, but i'm stoked that I did :)

Its a good way to kill some time, however I just need to get my longer battery, I have a long flight ahead of my (about 25 hours in total including stopover time). and my battery that lasts 2.5 hours just isn't going to cut the mustard.

Anyway, Wish me a good flight. I will try and blog again in Brunei :)

Seeya

Getting things done

Well its been a bit hectic, i've been everywhere at once this week finalising everything and preparing to pack before I leave. It has been confirmed that I will be picked up by my uncle in london so that is fantastic news, the last thing I need after 27 hours of travel is to have to find a way of getting to their house on my own!.

At the moment it looks as if I am packing for a holiday, and i have a sneaking suspision that I am going to leave too many important things behind, but so be it, they can get sent over later if they are that important.

I'm sure there are 100 things I havent thought of yet that I will need to do before I leave, but hopefully at least 90 of them come to me before saturday :)

Parting Gift

As a parting gift from my job at PalmTEQ I received a Palm Tungsten E. Going to be very handy indeed. As I am going away I needed to search for some decent travel related software for PalmOS. Out popped Amy Fong's (Free) Travel programs for Palm OS.. Gotta love free stuff!

iTunes Update

I decided to give iTunes a fair go. Seeings as I am moving to the UK this month and the last thing I needed to was haul 150 or so CD's globally I decided to rip them all to my laptop as mp3s. This task was entrusted to iTunes.

I can honestly say that there was not 1 hiccup over the few weeks that I was ripping the cds. All of them encoded in sweet 160kbps quality (in my opinion the best compromise between size and quality). I love the jukebox features, smart playlists etc.

Despite the fact that It doesnt act like all other well behaved Windows apps i have now uninstalled Winamp and am using iTunes exclusively.

But the best Windows app ever? Hardly.

PS. This is my first post written in Zempt. Seems to work okay, they just need to eye-candy it up a bit :)

Mozilla Calendar

Oh, btw, I thought that I should mention that about a week (give or take) after posting about my problems getting the Calendar to work with Mozilla Firebird 0.7 it just started working. I didn't touch a thing, honest! (I had almost given up on it and had started re-entering my calendar into OutlookXP)