We were supposed to go to the Chill Island festival today but it was postponed due to heavy rain and gale force winds.

What else to do but lie around all day?

I must admit, I was a tad lazy with today’s shot. It’s a run-of-the-mill documentary shot but at least the “action” hand came out as I wanted.

Day Nine
Amsterdam
16 August 2007 22:39

Today was a lazy day. After more than a week of walking until we almost collapsed we needed some time off.

We ended up watching TV (most of which was in Dutch) until around 10:30am and headed out around 11:00am. An episode of Spongebob was quite funny in Dutch.

After, we strolled out to the Van Gogh Museum where we waited in yet another line for ~25 minutes before entering. I’m not a fan of Van Gogh’s style and don’t consider him to have been a particularly good painter and the museum didn’t change that. Justine did enjoy the museum though.

Walking back in the direction of our hotel, we grabbed some food from a local supermarket and decided to return to our hotel.

Some TV was in English so we flicked channels a little while, while eating our sandwiches.

Around 10:00pm (nothing opens hereuntil 11:00am or 12:00pm and is open late) we headed out and grabbed some fritjes (French fries) and fritssaus (fry sauce), which is a creamy mayonnaise-style sauce that is widely eaten here. A stir-fry place was next door so we grabbed some rice and shared both.

We needed a “day off” (strange we needed a holiday from our holiday) and both feel a lot better for it.

Tomorrow evening we leave for Munich on an overnight train which will be interesting, I’m sure.

Justine and I frequently do our grocery shopping on weekends, since we find it difficult to do it during the week. This past weekend, we were too busy to even contemplate going shopping, which left us with a choice: Buy food or end up having take away all week.

Sure, the take away option sounds good, but it’s expensive and the food isn’t usually as good. On Sunday, we decided that we would try one of the online shopping services.

Coles Online is the better known of the online grocery stores — at least to me; the service launched a few years ago now — eight? nine? — though the availability was very limited. Safeway (Woolworths) also has a service: HomeShop, which appears to have launched four years ago.

Since we shop at Coles — our closest supermarket is Coles; the local Safeways are dirty and have rude staff — we decided to give Coles Online a shot. The first thing I noticed is that the design of the site does not appear to have changed since the first time I checked it out, which just so happened to be a few weeks after it launched. The second thing I noticed is that the site is slow. Molasses slow.

HomeShop, on the other hand, is a far nicer-looking site, loads faster and just seems to be a more user-friendly and polished experience.

Using our regular shopping list (we just jot it down on paper located in the kitchen) we added all the items to our virtual trolley. It took quite a while navigating the site, as finding items only by their name is not as easy as recognising the packet.

Eventually, we had our shopping list, and proceeded to checkout. HomeShop charges (for us, at least) between $7.50 and $10.00 for delivery, depending on the times and delivery window. Conveniently, though, they deliver during the evening. We chose a 5-8pm window, though a 6-9pm one was also available. This delivery window was $7.50, but as we were first-time customers, the fee was waived (which we didn’t know until the final total was presented).

All that was left was to wait. So wait we did.

At 7:50pm the delivery truck arrived — and I expect this would be the norm — with our bags of groceries. Everything we’d ordered was included, as well as a sample of Nivea face wash. Why? No idea. The ice cream was a tad melty, like it’d been left in the car for an hour or two, but everything else was fine. We included fresh fruit and vegetables in our order and they all looked fine; some looked better than in-store produce, likely because it came directly from a warehouse.

A fuel discount voucher was also included — with eight cents off, which is twice our normal discount.

We didn’t get any meat, as they don’t offer the brand of chicken we buy and I like to choose my cuts of beef. The delivery may be a bit more expensive, but we refrained from impulse purchases. All in all I can see us using HomeShop again; since it saves everything you buy in a list, successive shops will be significantly faster.

A lazy day at home watching some TV and doing sparse chunks of housework saw me switching onto the Red Bull Air Race World Series which was on this weekend in Perth. I’ve seen some footage of these planes before but this was a longer viewing.

Over three hundred thousand people turned up to the Swan River in Perth (it must have been everyone who lives in Perth!) to watch the planes twist, turn, spin and generally do a number of impressive flights through a course on the river itself.

Some of the pilots pulled over 11Gs in the turns, as well as hitting over 300km/h just metres above the water. Fast, dangerous, and very exciting. It doesn’t really make the most exciting television since the pilots just do two time trials runs where other sports — such as F1, or football, or other “one event” sports — often have a bit more give and take. Obviously you couldn’t have all the planes on the course at once but I wonder if there’s a way they can make the whole thing more exciting than just a series of time trials.

I’m not referring to the fact that I’ve not posted for almost a week, but rather to how I’ve been using technology to avoid having to move my lazy butt from off the couch.

Almost a year ago, I purchased a wireless router which just wouldn’t work, no matter what I did. I tried a lot of stuff and it just wouldn’t work. A few months back, I borrowed a wireless ADSL modem which was not being used at work, and tried to get it to work. Again, no luck.

At this point into the post, you could be forgiven for thinking that I dislike wireless equipment. On the contrary, wireless stuff is great; I’ve just had extremely little luck at home with the wireless stuff I’ve tried. I thought it must have been something to do with our house, but I again decided to bring another wireless unit home from work that will receive little to no use over the Easter break, and lo and behold, it seems to work!

However, there’s definitely a lot of wall (or something in the walls) that prevent the wireless signal from being as good as it could. Using my work laptop, I’ve only connected at 24Mbps rather than the maximum possible 54Mbps of the unit being used.

But hey, I digress, none of that garbage you’ve presumably just read is the point of this post. In fact, the title of the post hardly seems relevant now, since I’ve written so much crap in a post about my laziness.

Sitting here on the couch with my laptop, I wirelessly VNCed into my “main” computer, controlled it to navigate to a website and downloaded a couple of files. That effort saved me a 25 step round trip to sit down in front of the computer.

And then I took a bunch more time to write about it.

Well, I blew it. I said I’d post once a day yesterday and I didn’t even post on the first day. Nevermind. Let’s try that again:

Got up early (for a Saturday) at 9am this morning; I helped Justine’s dad, John, collect a fridge from Port Melbourne. Took a lot longer than I’d expected but on the way home I picked up a wireless router and ethernet-to-wireless bridge to go with it. This was to replace the CAT5 cable running down the hallway.

When I finally got back home, at around 2:30 in the afternoon, I went straight into setting up my new toys. Eventually I got managed to get the router, bridge and wireless laptop I’d borrowed from work to see one another… except that the ethernet bridge wouldn’t work when the Xbox was turned on (only when it was turned off). The reason I purchased the bridge was for the Xbox… great.

So here I sit, over seven hours after I started; the laptop is directly next to the wireless unit and won’t even connect. I give up. I’ve done all the regular stuff (try no security, try lots of security, hardware resets, firmware upgrades, downgrades, and more) and I’m sick of it. The router just stops intermittently and the ethernet bridge becomes invisible at it’s discretion. It all interferes with our wireless TV sender anyway.

Consumer wireless gear isn’t mature enough yet (the ultra-expensive Cisco stuff at work is great); I think it still needs a lot of work.