theducks | (no subject)

Been a bit of a hectic week.. had tuesday and wednesday off work with some form of plauge. Most annoying. Got offered a medicial cert for thursday as well, but wanted to get some stuff sorted out.

Thursday I didn't feel that great all day, but was good enough to be at work. The orders have been placed for the evil plan I've mentioned a few times. So I may as well say here..

We get a lot of complaints about the cost of Internet access (mm $40/gb) from students living on campus. And we agree, it sucks. We're not profiteering however, it really does cost us about $38/gb to provide that service through the University's AARNet connection. But y'know, it doesn't have to, and in some cases, it really shouldn't. Last October, I started looking into how much it would cost to actually provide a service that didn't go through AARNet.

We talked to Legal, we talked to AARNet, we talked to our prospective clients, got all sorts of approvals, quotes and inputs. We've put in an order for a 10M/10M connection to a commercial ISP, and providing access to that connection for students living in UWA colleges, wireless users at The University Club, and intend to offer it to Venues Management for events on campus, commercial affiliates on UWA property like Winthrop, Philips Farmer Photography, and probably to other affiliated non-academic organisations such as UCC.

10M/10M isn't that great, but once we get some more users, we'll upgrade it to 20M/20M and probably 30M/30M within 2 years. Mmm bandwidth.

Also on Thursday, found a Orinoco 802.11b Gold PCMCIA card (not cardbus!) and after a bit of work, I now have a wifi capable Powerbook 1400. Of course, the battery is shot, so it won't actually be that portable.

It also seems that sadly

lizbyrd seems to have got whatever I did. wups. She left work early today (before lunch). Poor thing.

Work this afternoon and today was basically packing up most of the office. Hopefully all my stuff will be in our new offices on monday morning. Mmm new offices. We also had a bit of a wake for the contents of the fridge. So consequently, no need for dinner for me.

Went to see X Men 3 tonight. It was a fundraiser for Swancon. As

lizbyrd was sick, I went with susie. Movie was good, was fun seeing all the people who came too.

Tomorrow I'm going to see my mum. She's off to do the trans-siberian railway from Beijing to Moscow on Sunday, and doesn't get back until after we leave.. so I won't see her till August. That seems a loong time away.

Enough random ranting for now.