Monday, December 19, 2005

To Canberra I go

Once again I find myself waiting to leave for Brisbane airport to leave to some far away land, well, kinda far away, further than I normally go anyway. This time we're going to Canberra, where our esteemed federal government resides. I'm going to have to restrain myself from doing something silly like throwing a urine filled water bomb at the prime minister - he's on holidays now so I guess the chance won't arise anyway.

I will be installing stuff at two locations - Quality Inn Dickson and Quality Inn Woden. So if you find yourself in dire need of in-room Internet access while staying in Canberra, then those are the two places to try. Both sites are Ethernet type installations, fairly simple and straight forward as long as the cabling is done correctly and the distances between the MDF and rooms isn't huge.

The lead up to this trip was just as disorganised and stressful as the Cairns trip. No one thinks ahead very far and given that they don't think of anyone else either. I just configured the two Cisco SOHO97 DSL routers and two Colubris MSC3200 this morning when the Telstra DSL activation info came in - the day before the installation will take place... I've already put in place procedures that will prevent such issues in future - basically making sure the sales people hand off all technical tasks to the technical people, one would think that was expected, but obviously not.

Don't know what airline I'm flying with, I'm hoping Virgin given the last Jetstar flight from Cairns. Although I did appreciate that Jetstar provide you with fragile (aka, don't play tarmac footy with this one) tags for your laptop bag etc when booking it on as baggage - although Virgin could be treating all baggage as fragile...

I'm currently reading a book about the Australian SAS - The Amazing SAS: The inside story of Australia's Special Forces. It provides good insight to what our leet lads get up to and how they operate. Although the book could do without the stupid Liberal/Howard government propaganda bullshit - personally I don't see any need for it given the subject, what ever happened to the abstraction between the government and the military? Anyway, I won't be too critical until I've read a few other books about the subject, however I have read a few books about the British SAS and there wasn't any mention about their government apart from what was necessary to explain the finer points.

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