I've started getting a lot of emails in German lately, but Mutt hasn't been displaying them properly. For non-us-ascii characters (e.g. ß), it'd either show \223, or a '?'. This was really beginning to bug me.

Occasionally, you see massive lotto jackpots. On New Years Eve, the pot was around the $30 million mark. The higher the jackpot gets, the more tickets are sold.

It's a very strange form of gambling. Most people probably pay around $20 for a lotto ticket, and have a 1 in 2,036,265 chance of winning the jackpot. And even when you do, it's likely you'll have to share it with a number of other people. In the New Years Eve 2010 draw, 19 people shared the Division 1 prize!

So, I just couldn't go past the $35 pricetag on the TP-Link TD-8840. The tards on Whirlpool had nothing but high praise for it, claiming the Broadcom chipset that it uses is bulletproof.

My ADSL modem at home's on its way out. It's been going at it hard for the last 4 years, but now needs a periodic "kick in the pants" now around every 2 days.

In my desperate search for a replacement, it's become clear to me that the "good" companies don't seem to bother making ADSL2+ modems anymore. They've all got wireless built-in nowadays.

I don't need wireless built in!

Last December a group of my friends and my partner went on a European driving tour and I've finally gotten around to writing about it . When we went we found very little information on the perils of European driving and though people had obviously done it before we couldn't find many blog posts with tips and tricks. I had a blast and would recommend it to anyone but these are the things you should consider.

Back in 2008, the SBS had the deranged idea that they could take the Top Gear (UK) formula, throw terrible Australian presenters at it, and be flush with an instant hit. How wrong they were.

I attended the ACS National IT Debate held at the National Press Conference. Senator Conroy was there as well as the Shadow Minister and a Greens Rep (who was surprisingly coherent). The debate mainly focused around the NBN. I'm still out on whether it's a good idea, though I'm not sure the Liberal policy is any good either. Here my thoughts so far:

Ricotta pancakes with blueberry compote

Blueberry compote
500g frozen blueberries
1/4 cup sugar
Juice of ½ lemon

1. Combine the blueberries, sugar, and lemon juice in a saucepan over a medium heat.
2. Cook, stirring frequently, until some of the liquid cooks off and the sauce thickens.

Ricotta Pancakes (serves 4)
1 cup fresh ricotta cheese
4 large eggs, separated
3/4 cup buttermilk, shaken
1 cup self raising flour
Pinch of salt
1/4 cup sugar

When hitting the default website (i.e. http://corp.example.com/) -- NOT OWA, are you getting this error?

HTTP Error 500.0 - Internal Server Error
Calling LoadLibraryEx on ISAPI filter "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\owa\auth\owaauth.dll" failed
Error Code 0x8007007e

Have you just installed Exchange 2007 SP1 onto your shiney new Windows Server 2008 R2 box?

Top Gear Australia: Not again!
If there's one piece of advice I could give to every company that has customers, it would be "under-promise, and over-deliver".

It's expectation management 101.

I have a vendor whom we regularly have to deal with. This particular vendor will regularly promise that a release will be delivered to us, with certain features, and "by X date". Every release, that date slips by around 14 days, and is missing a number of promised features.