If you're a customer of NAB (formerly known as National Australia Bank), you'll no doubt have found the way its internet banking opens up in a new, full-screen window — even if you have a 30" monitor.

In the office, this is particularly annoying because it makes it difficult to discreetly check your bank balance without giving everyone around you a "full screen view" of your finances.

A looooong time ago my old friend Simon Wright (proprietor of the excellent Whirlpool.net.au online community) wrote a script to stop this annoying full screen NAB internet banking behaviour.

It's a "userscript" that slightly modifies the code on the NAB homepage to stop this annoying pop-up behaviour. To use it, you have to install a plug-in in your browser — Greasemonkey on Firefox or GreaseKit on Safari. Chrome has the capability built in already.

To install the script in Firefox:

1. Install the Greasemonkey for Firefox plugin

2. Restart Firefox (File > Quit) then reopen it

3. Click on this link to download Simon's NAB Internet Banking no-fullscreen UserScript

4. Click the "install" button that comes up.

5. Enjoy your NAB internet banking without the stupid 90s full-screen pop-up window!

To install the script in Safari:

1. Install Ninjakit for Safari (download the extension file, then double click it in the downloads list to open and install it)

2. Click on this link to download Simon's NAB Internet Banking no-fullscreen UserScript [currently I can't find a way to actually install the script as of Safari 5.1.5… waiting for the developer of Ninjakit to release an update.)

To install the script in Chrome:

1. Go into Chrome

2. Click on this link to download Simon's NAB Internet Banking no-fullscreen UserScript

3. Click the "add" button that comes up.

4. Enjoy your NAB internet banking without the stupid 90s full-screen pop-up window!

I heard the very sad news yesterday that one of my colleagues and close friends, John Pospisil, passed away two days ago, aged just 39.

He had been treated for a brain tumor since 2009, and had gone through surgery, chemo, radiotherapy and an experimental treatment trial, and as far as I knew, the cancer was at least being held at bay.

However, I know that when John became aware he was ill (with a phone call, "Would you mind if I didn't attend a meeting with a client and you took my place… I don't want to freak you out, but I've just found out, well, that I have a brain tumor"), that he was not keen to broadcast it to the world. He wanted to keep on doing the things — and being with the people — he loved, without focusing on the sickness.

His many online outlets show he has been active right to the end of his life, which is, I know, exactly what he would have wanted.

He was one of the most decent guys I've ever known — generous with his time and in his business deals and utterly devoted to his wife Rocio and two young children Grace and Hannah.

He was always keen for a stimulating and entertaining chat about the machinations of the tech media, and musings over how exactly Google News' algorithms worked. I met him regularly for lunch or coffee and we chewed over ideas for new ventures and swapped tips on our own successes and failures.

But as I got to know John better, we connected on a philosophical level as well. He told me about his faith and that he believed God had shown himself to him. We both shared a deep love for family.

On a professional level, John had a string of successes, borne from his creative, entrepreneurial spirit.

He conceived, founded and edited Computer CHOICE magazine (CHOICE has published a lovely memorial article about him here); founded and ran Free Access, an IT newspaper that was distributed with great success through retailers for many years.

He wrote a book on hacking MySpace (something he always reminisced on with a mix of mirth and entrepreneurial pride, as it was a case of 'right time, right place' even though he wasn't really that interested in MySpace), and published a series of computer and business related books for CHOICE.

More recently, he ran a very successful blog network called Blorge, reporting on the global technology space, and fostering the talents of many bloggers.

Alongside all that, he was also a successful marketing/comms consultant.

Behind the scenes, he has quietly been a MediaConnect IT Journo awards judge in the past, helping to recognise the work of the best IT journalists in the industry.

Despite his many successes, his beautifully humble approach to the world is encapsulated well in what he wrote on his "about" page — "I’m husband to Rocio and father to Grace and Hannah – my greatest achievements. The truth is, any material success I’ve had in this life really comes down to being at the right place at the right time. That’s not false modesty, just an acknowledgement of how life truly works. If you need me to help you with something, you already know who am, and how I can help. Just get in touch."

As CHOICE's Chris Ruggle points out, though, "John Pospisil joined CHOICE in 1994 as a young man who often expressed surprise at how lucky he was to work here. In fact, he made most of his own luck through his intellect and hard work."

I couldn't agree more with a comment one of his other friends, Ravi Prasad, wrote in his memory: "John was a good friend. I was expecting us to be friends for the rest of my life. Friends like these are hard to find, you only get a handful in a lifetime. He was so funny and clever and bright and totally charming. I’ll miss John. Rocio, my thoughts are with you and your beautiful children."

John's funeral will be this Monday, 21st November 2011. Email me for the details.

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Don't like Mac OS X 10.7 Lion's annoying window zoom effect for new windows? Thanks to Tomas Franz, you can disable it. Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and copy and paste the following line:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

You then need to restart any apps that are running for them to get the new setting.

Hurrah! Snappy window performance again.

Also, if you want to restore CMD+D to being "don't save" as it was in previous versions of OS X, you can do that with this command:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSSavePanelStandardDesktopShortcutOnly -bool YES

Ahhh… very interesting. Like everyone else, I love that amazing picture by Getty Images photographer Rich Lam of the couple kissing in the middle of the riot in Vancouver, but there are so many theories about whether the picture was posed; whether the couple was doing some new form of planking (or perhaps a much older form), etc…

This amateur video from a balcony overlooking the Vancouver riot lets you see what really happened.

Even though the video makes clear that the girl was knocked down roughly and the guy was comforting her (and he gave her a quick kiss too, by his own account), it's obvious from the video that it was a bona fide moment, not something staged.

The picture itself is one of the best pictures I've ever seen — both in the evocative emotions it captured and the framing and technical photography. Just stunning.

It also warms the cockles of my heart to know that the guy is Australian Scott Jones, with his Vancouver girlfriend, Alexandra Thomas. His dad, Brett Jones, posted on Facebook, "That's my son! How's that for making love, not war!"

Just awesome.

This is a great blog post on how to get the Android emulator running on Mac OS X. Thanks to Jordan Kahn for publishing it. I wish Google would make it a bit more obvious in its official instructions!

Ever wondered whether there are cheaper carparks than the excruciatingly expensive ones at Sydney Airport? The answer is yes!

I just spent a day researching this and found all the carparks in the area — and which ones were cheapest for a 1 day, 2 day, 3 day (etc) stay right through to 15 days.

Check it out — (I'm posting it here for my own reference as much as anyone else…!)

Cheapest car parks around Sydney Airport

If, like me, you took Steve Jobs at his word when he said iPhoto 6 onwards could support up to 250,000 images, and you've been piling them in ever since, you've probably got a very large iPhoto library.

Mine is currently sitting at 66,431 images and is 220GB on disk. It's so big that it convinced me to part with $1800 (Australian) to get the 512GB SSD Apple is making an option with the latest MacBook Pros. Obviously, at that price, it's a ludicrously overpriced option at $3.50/GB compared to smaller, cheaper SSDs, typically around $2.50/GB, or mechanical hard drives at about $0.14/GB, but I wanted to have a boot drive on which I could have my full iPhoto library so I could work with pictures much more quickly (and boy, does it make a big difference.)

However, one problem I've been seeking an answer to for years now is how to backup my photos off-site, in case a house fire takes out both my MacBook Pro and my Time Capsule backup. (Or, if my house was burgled and both the MacBook Pro and Time Capsule were stolen — which actually happened to a family member of mine.)

Simply dropping the iPhoto library into an online backup program like Carbonite or Mozy isn't viable, because uploading 200GB of data takes so long that it basically never completes — or the backup system gets so far behind that you'd be losing a lot of new photos if your house burned down.

The 'ideal' solution I had in mind was to do Time Machine backups constantly to my Time Capsule, as well as a fallback backup of downscaled resolution photos to an online backup location. I like Dropbox (my referral link included in that link) because it works so quietly and reliably in the background, but you could use any online backup service. Although some people might say that backing up the full resolution photos is important to them, to me, the most important thing is making sure those frozen memories don't get lost — and if I downscale them to fit within 1920x1920px, then I still have a high definition, albeit not camera-resolution, version of the photo.

I've now figured out how to do it! Full details after the jump.

I found a great tool to do this called Phoshare, created by Google! Tilman Sporkert, who works for Google in San Francisco, created the tool in his "20% time" — the time Google employees get to pursue projects of interest to them and the community.

Tilman says he likes managing his photos in iPhoto, but doesn't like the fact that iPhoto effectively holds his photo library prisoner in its application-managed bundle file. He wanted to make a tool that could sync the photos to a different location to be used in other photo tools as well like Google Picasa or with home theatre boxes that could only read pictures from a file tree.

"I like managing and editing my photos with iPhoto, but I don't like having my work kept hostage inside iPhoto. I also like Picasa from Google, for its speed and easy management of online albums (check out the "Sync to Web" feature), and it's ability to automatically discover images, even if stored elsewhere on your network. And sometimes I feel like using Adobe Bridge. So it's important to me that any work I invest into my photo collection (edits, organization, annotations, tagging) is not tied up in one application. That's where phoshare comes in. I've used variations of this tool for many years," he writes on the Phoshare project homepage.

The GUI for Phoshare makes doing this task — liberating pictures from iPhoto to another place — a piece of cake.

However, Tilman also built in the ability to rescale photos at the time they were synced — though this is not in the GUI; you have to do it via the command line. It uses the Core Image library which is a powerful Apple-supplied tool baked into OS X for processing images. Phoshare saves images at 90% JPEG quality, so you don't lose visual quality, and it can also be set to export data on faces, star ratings, keywords, etc to the JPEG files for use in other programs.

With the correct command line options, you can create a duplicate copy of your iPhoto library in your Dropbox folder, which will then be synced to Dropbox's servers (and other computers syncing with your Dropbox account) for safekeeping.

The other really great thing about Phoshare is that it is designed as a regular sync tool, rather than a one-time export tool (though it certainly can be used as that as well.) Once you have run it through your library once, you can run it again whenever you like and it will very quickly update your sync location with just new photos you've imported into iPhoto. (You can also set it to delete photos from the sync target that you have deleted from iPhoto.)

How to install Phoshare

You can install the Phoshare package easily from Tilman's Google Code website. Image resizing is built in, but to get the metadata export aspect working, you'll have to install one other third-party library first.

Here's how:

1) Download and install ExifTool, which will give Phoshare the ability to write iPhoto's faces, star ratings, keywords, event names etc into the EXIF data in the exported JPEGs. (EXIF data is the way cameras embed information into saved photos, but it's equally useful for embedding info from iPhoto.)

2) Download Phoshare and move it to your Applications folder. Make sure you grab the latest version, 1.1 (or better — at the time of this article update, it was up to 1.4.5) because Tilman has built image scaling right into the app, which makes things a lot simpler than before.

3) Now's the fun part — using it via the command line. Tilman has written up an explanation of all the command line options on his Scripting with Phoshare page, but here's one I prepared earlier that will do the job of taking an iPhoto library in its default location and saving it to a folder in the default Dropbox location called "iPhoto backup". It will downscale the images to a maximum size of 1920px in either height or width, and it won't upscale photos that are already smaller than that.

/Applications/Phoshare.app/Contents/*MacOS/Phoshare* -e . -d -k -u --size 1920 --iphoto "~/Pictures/iPhoto Library" --export "~/Dropbox/iPhoto Backup"

To explain the command line to you, I've broken it down below:

There are many other command line options you could use, such as writing face data into the photos, exporting place names and GPS coordinates, and more. You can get a full list of the possible options by typing the following into a Terminal window:

/Applications/Phoshare.app/Contents/Resources/Phoshare.py -- help

4) Now wait; it'll take many hours to process all your images (depending on how many you have). I found it took about one second per image processed — so with my 66,000 images, a quick Google calculation estimated an export time of 18.33 hours. I do have a fairly fast system though — a 2.66GHz Core i7 with 8GB RAM and an SSD drive, so your speed may vary.

Phoshare running in the Terminal, exporting images from iPhoto to my Dropbox folder:

I found Phoshare crashed a few times during export, but I was able to restart it and it would resume where it left off. If Phoshare crashes neatly it will output a debug log, which you can copy and paste into a bug report for Tilman to look at. He fixed one problem I encountered (crashing on images with no timestamp) within hours — huge thanks to him for that.

The resulting image files, exported at a max size of 1920×1920 had an average file size of 830KB, which means my 67,106 images took up 57.17GB. This is a bit too large to fit into a $10/mth Dropbox 50GB plan — but of course, you can tweak the image dimensions to get filesize down, or you could use another online backup tool that uses Amazon S3 storage (and therefore should have a similar upload speed to Dropbox).

Voila: the resulting exported photos in the Finder:

This, of, course, will take days to upload to Dropbox — I found I was able to upload about 5GB overnight with Dropbox averaging around 100KB/s upload speed, so I expect this will take somewhere between four days and two weeks to finish. Of course, the big advantage of Dropbox is that it never bugs you with error messages — it just sits in the background uploading away constantly, and never seems to crash or hang.

Thanks to Tilman for making this great tool — and having the foresight to include image scaling options even though it wasn't really central to his personal needs. Three cheers for independent software developers turning out high quality freeware to fill the gaps left by commercial developers…!

After my iPad-buying rant a few months ago when I'd travelled to the US to buy one of the first iPads for ACP, only to find NAB's systems were all down and I therefore couldn't pay for it, I was assured by NAB's PRs that they would look into putting better processes in place to warn customers of scheduled outages.

Yet, here I am in the US again, trying to check in to a hotel and all my NAB cards are declining — even though I know there's plenty of money in the accounts.

NAB's internet banking presents this message, advising me to try using phone banking instead.

Which yields this recorded message. Sigh…!

It does appear that NAB is making an effort to let customers know of forthcoming scheduled maintenance on their systems. For example, the last message I got from them is below:

However, that message says nothing about scheduled maintenance on 11th/12th September.

My guess is that today's six-hour long outage (their systems are back online now) was probably a system failure, and there was no-one rostered on to fix it overnight. The problem got fixed pretty much around Australian breakfast time, September 12th. It is really irritating, though, that the standard message that comes up in case of system failures specifically says "scheduled maintenance". I would appreciate a bit of honesty here: either the system is down and they are fixing it urgently, or they are doing scheduled maintenance that they failed to tell me about, and left me in the lurch AGAIN.

TomToms are tricky little suckers to get third-party USB chargers for, because they use an unusually high amount of power. While most USB car chargers put out a maximum of 0.5A, TomToms need 1.2A – 2A depending on the model.

If you want to charge your iPhone and TomTom at once, the choices are slim; you can:

- buy one of these dual cigarette lighter adaptors from Dick Smith and plug in two chargers at once…

- install a car stereo that has an iPod cord and charge your iPhone off that, and use your cigarette lighter jack for the TomTom charger
- manually swap between the chargers…!

Now Scosche in the US has released a $US24.99 dual USB car charger with one port that puts out 2.1A and another port that puts out 1A. The former is perfect for TomTom and the latter for iPhones or most other USB devices.

Its marketing name is Scosche ReVIVE II, but confusingly there is another product called ReVIVE II that only puts out 2 x 1A — so you are better off searching for it using the product code Scosche USBC3.

Only trouble is that they're currently out of stock on Scosche's website. Scosche reckons they were in stock as recently as 10th August — so they must have sold out quickly. They are, however, in stock at Amazon.com, if you use a US buying agent such as PriceUSA.com.au.

If you've paired a Bluetooth audio device with your Mac, even if it supports A2DP, you might have noticed how awful and rough the sound quality is. I've always put this down to Bluetooth being a rubbish standard when it comes to sound, but I noticed how good a set of Motorokr Bluetooth headphones sounded when I connected them to my Blackberry tonight, even though they sound awful on the Mac.

Turns out that OS X uses a horribly low bit rate for Bluetooth audio by default — who knows why. Perhaps it's to allow for maximum compatibility with all devices.

The easy way to fix it is to copy and paste this line into your terminal:

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Min (editable)" 40

The "40" is the quality — depending on your Bluetooth headset, you can adjust it up for higher quality, or down if you have connection problems. 40 worked for me with a Motorokr S9 headset.

There are many arguments that Senator Conroy has pulled out in support of implementing nationwide internet censorship on every Australian's internet connection — all of them bad. But the WORST, in my opinion, is that the previous government's "NetAlert" program, which provided government-funded PC software which filtered a home internet connection, was an abject failure due to low take-up.

In the last week or so I've noticed active participation in online forums with clearly pro-Conroy comments (such as one from "BTDT", who I assume works for DBCDE in some capacity, but doesn't declare it.) He makes the argument above.

The thing is, NetAlert was only an abject failure if your measure of success is widespread implementation of filtering onto people's internet connections.

Why assume this is what the public wants? The NetAlert program was extensively marketed at a cost of millions of dollars to the government, with mailouts to every household in Australia, and so on. The fact that takeup was low doesn't mean the program was a failure — it simply indicates that only a very tiny minority of people want their home internet connections filtered. Which is still the case now, given opposition to the government's planned mandatory internet filter by literally everyone except christian lobby groups. I'm yet to hear from anyone who's not affiliated with a christian lobby group who is in favour of the plan.

I can't believe this isn't mentioned on the internet -anywhere- that I can find. (Edit: the owner of the dog wash has got in touch and let me know about his new website – laundromuttdogwash.com.au) We discovered it just by driving past – a self service dog wash for $10 per dog (which buys 10 minutes' usage). It works much like the self-service car washes, with the dial that lets you flip from shampoo, to rinse, to conditioner, to flea wash, to hairdryer. According to the sign it was a "K9000" dog wash.

It's at Zoom Carwash at 289 Liverpool Road in Strathfield (which in itself seems absolutely impossible to find in Google by searching on its name — the owners of this particular carwash do not seem to have discovered the internet for marketing). The dog wash is on the right hand side of the yard — where the red circle on this Google Streeview picture is (evidently it's a recent addition because it wasn't there when the Street View car went past.) It's coin operated (also takes $5 or $10 notes).

I'm really happy about this, because our dogs hate the cold water from the garden hose (they let out a sort of blood-curdling howl when we try to wash them with it) and washing them with buckets of warm water carried from the kitchen means we wash them less often than we'd like to, because it's a bit of a hassle.

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Now this is a much nicer way of using the ex-PM's downfall in advertising. I think Jetstar misread the mood with its ads.

Who let the teenagers into the marketing department?

This is the most gut-wrenching thing I've ever watched. For once we saw a politician's genuine emotion. If only Kevin Rudd had been able to let this true side of him show through when he was P.M. Watching his raw emotion nearly made me shed a tear…! It was nice to see Theresa Rein step in and support him up-close.

Kevin Rudd clearly had a problem with his political machinations in terms of driving through the implementation of major policies, but he is a smart guy and I don't think he really deserved this dumping. That is to say: perhaps it was necessary for the future success of the Labor Party, but as a person, I don't think he was given a fair go.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I've recently installed an MCE Optibay with 750GB WD HDD into my new MacBook Pro, alongside the 512GB SSD I got from Apple, providing me with a beautiful 1.25TB of total storage in a slim MacBook Pro. (The MCE Optibay replaces the optical drive in the MacBook Pro, allowing you to install a second 2.5" hard drive of your choice securely in its place.)

I'm planning to use the 750GB Optibay drive for storing music and video files, since they don't need high performance, and the drive can be allowed to spin down when I'm not listening to music or watching videos, which seems like an ideal arrangement from a power efficiency perspective.

However, by default OS X seems to take about 10 minutes to spin down the drive after it was last accessed. I found a great tip on MacOSXHints.com which describes how to set the system spindown time — you just open up a Terminal shell and type:

sudo pmset -a spindown 1

(where 1 is 1 minute; 0 disables entirely).

So now, my Optibay drive spins down one minute after it was last used — perfect! (Especially good since my MBP is near-silent with the SSD just in use, thanks to Apple's really quiet fans when running at their default 2000rpm, and the WD hard drive in the Optibay is actually quite noisy — it's an audial relief when it spins down!)

The same tip above can be used to disable spindown if you don't want it to happen.

The only thing I'm wondering is what effect a spindown has on an SSD, if any. The value set using this tip is system-wide, affecting all hard drives, so if a spindown did happen to put the SSD into some sort of powersaving mode that might not be ideal, however, I haven't noticed anything yet.

Like other MacBook Pro owners, I find Apple's choice of SD card slot for their sole card reader in the MacBook Pro annoying — basically all Digital SLR cameras except for the dinky low-end ones still use the larger Compact Flash cards. As a result, I still have to dig out a USB card reader every time I want to download pics from my D700.

It occurred to me today, though, that since SD cards are smaller than CF cards, perhaps someone has made an SD-to-CF adaptor. Lo and behold, a little Google searching turned up several immediately.

However, it's not quite as simple as clicking 'buy'. The ones on the market at present are either Type II (which are 5mm thick, rather than the 3.3mm of Type I, and therefore not compatible with my D700, which only supports Type I), or are Type 1 cards in thickness, but generally have the SD card poking out the back of the card a bit (e.g. 16mm) so in most cases, the camera door won't shut over it — not really an option for me.

There's a good article on SD-to-CF adaptors at CameraHacker, and a thread on Whirlpool about it, but no sign of a Type I SD-to-CF card adaptor to fit in my D700, disappointingly.

Anyone seen one that will?

One thing that really annoys me about Firefox on Mac OS X is the way it spawns a second dock icon for itself after it applies any sort of update to itself (including plugin updates).

Here's a screenshot of the offender in action (I removed some icons from the middle of the dock to make it easier to see:

For those of you who might assume I am a moron, no, I don't have two copies of Firefox, and no, I am not running one copy of Firefox from a DMG or anything like that.

Nobody on the web seems to have found a solution for it yet — as far as I can tell from Googling. There are several bugs on Mozilla's Bugzilla system related to it, and the main one seems to be bug 432520, which is unfortunately not yet assigned to a developer for resolution.

One of the big problems has been that nobody's been able to define a clear set of steps to reproduce the problem. I believe the second dock icon appears after Firefox auto-updates an extension at startup time, and then silently restarts itself to allow the extension update to take effect. However, it's difficult to test because the hypothesis requires an updated extension to be available — which only happens every now-and-again.

Anyone else got ideas?

I love it when people turn Apple marketing back on itself.

This is the -new- Adobe Updater that's supposed to be less annoying than the old one. Except it's a big, fat fail whale.

For the record: nothing about my installation of Acrobat is non-standard, and all the previous updates with the old updater have worked fine. I have not run any language or PPC-code stripping utilities on my apps.

UPDATE 8 APR 2010: NAB has investigated my issue after I forwarded a copy of David Williams' ITWire article "No iPad for Aussie journo due to NAB outage" to a senior PR manager Luisa Ford there as an FYI. Ford was immediately apologetic and promised to pass the feedback on to the appropriate business and IT people within the NAB for further investigation. NAB's Email and Resolution Manager, Dawn Leicester wrote the following response to me today after pulling the recording of my call to the bank while in the Apple Store and talking to NAB's IT people:

Thanks for taking the time to share your experiences with us. I'm sorry to hear that it was such a frustrating one and hope that you were able to purchase your iPad eventually.

In terms of the problem, the advice you were given on Sunday morning was correct. The mainframe is brought down for an hour on the exit from Daylight Savings to avoid issues with time stamping of transactions. Given the timing of the conversion, it's hoped that the impact on clients will be minimal – of course this is not the optimal time for Australians overseas. In an attempt to further minimise the impact, there is an added layer of infrastructure in place which allows ATMs to provide cash to customers up to daily limits and for credit cards to provide auto approval of transactions up to a limit. I have, however, been advised that the company that provides our credit cards support also had their systems down for the daylight savings change. This certainly didn't help things.

I have raised the issue of communicating the outage to clients and been advised that this has never been done. We are now reviewing this policy and looking at the best way for such communication to occur. I understand your point and your annoyance at the lack of advice having been caught in a similar situation while overseas a few years ago.

Dan, I really appreciate your feedback and I apologise for your less than satisfactory experience and for the disappointment that you must have felt. I have passed on the feedback to the technical areas with a request that consideration be given for proactive communication prior to planned outages such as this.

If I can assist you further, please contact me on either the phone numbers or email address below.

That is what I would call a very well researched and balanced response — and I appreciate it.  For those who don't know the end to the story, I did eventually get the iPad — one for me and one for my employer. If I hadn't thought to call the 24 hour lost cards hotline, I might have given up, but fortunately the lost cards operator advised that the system would be coming back up within 45 minutes or so. So, I waited in the Apple Store theatrette and watched the same presentation about the virtues of the iPad from two Apple Store employees, the first of whom was almost crying with joy to be touching and demonstrating the device (he ended his presentation with "I think this has been a really great opportunity for me…"). Finally, the transaction went through after the very patient Apple Store sales guy came back to me several times, even after Apple's computer system had marked my card as a "fraud alert". So, all's well that ends well. Obviously, I'm a lot calmer now than I was when I wrote the post below inside the Apple Store San Francisco!

ORIGINAL POST: Trying to use my NAB Visa debit card in the Apple Store San Francisco today — declined, declined, declined! Even though I know there's plenty of money in the account.

After wrestling with NAB's pathetic call centres that are all only open during business hours, I finally get through to the lost cards line, which is open 24 hours.

Oh, there's no problem with the card, sir, the operator says — it's just that we're updating all our computer systems for daylight savings and so all our card transactions, internet and telephone banking systems are down.

Sure, it's 3.00am in Sydney, but it's 10am here in San Francisco where I am — and that coincides perfectly with the timing of when Apple iPads go on sale. Worse, I can't leave the store and go to an ATM to withdraw money because (a) I'd have to queue up again for hours and (b) I wouldn't be able to withdraw money anyway due to NAB's stupid outage.

The worst thing is that this was obviously a planned outage, but there was no advance warning from NAB — I didn't get an email from them, and if you try to use internet banking or telephone banking, it just says that the systems are down due to technical errors.

I think it's time that I switched to a more technically competent bank with easily accessible 24 hour customer service. This is really unacceptable.

As a real lover of hot cross buns, I salute this fine food journalism effort by Kate at the Eating Melbourne blog. I only wish I'd thought of doing it first (especially as I like eating hot cross buns so much.) She had a bunch of her friends around to do a blind test, too — now that is dedication to the scientific cause.

And the winner is… Natural Tucker in Melbourne, apparently. The bun does look yummy. Personally I think my mum's are still the best I've ever tasted, especially because she makes the cross on top out of real pastry which you can pick off and eat separately in strips, as opposed to this flour-n-water mix that commercial bakeries seem to use. (Or plaster of paris and liquid cement, in the case of Coles.)

Image credit: Kate at eatingmelbourneblog.com

Oh my gosh. This is so wrong on so many levels.

Snicker.

From this great new website I found, called Shanzai, which focuses on interesting stuff coming out of Chinese factories — a lot of them interesting knockoffs.

Can anyone tell me what the Mac keyboard shortcuts for the following are…? I haven't been able to figure them out myself, and they are the ONLY things I miss about Windows (after 10 years of using Macs)…

- Move to the top of a document
- Move to the bottom of a document
- Move to the start of a line
- Move to the end of a line

That's it!! It should be so easy, but using Apple's very cut-down keyboards, I can't figure out how to achieve it — even after Googling numerous times for it.

I wonder if any Qantas / Virgin Blue planes have ended up at the graveyard, or whether there are other aircraft dumps around the world.

Full post: Strange Geographies: The Mojave Desert's Airplane Graveyard

My strong dislike of Virgin Blue just ratcheted up a notch to "will avoid flying with them at any cost". I received an email from Virgin Blue last night congratulating me on achieving Velocity Gold frequent flyer membership, only to receive another one an hour later saying "you do not qualify for this upgrade. Please disregard".

The actual emails are after the jump.

Admittedly, I was surprised that I had qualified for Gold membership because I try to avoid flying Virgin Blue if I can and have only flown with them a few times in the past year (no alternative flights available). I loathe their too-cool-for-school flight attendants who tell tired and irritating jokes over the PA, and snap their fingers in front of your face if you're not paying attention to the inflight safety instructions that you've seen 400 times before (yes, this actually happened to me.) I may be turning into a grumpy old man, but I like to be treated like a paying customer, not a naughty schoolboy, so I always try to fly Qantas if I can.

The email I got from Virgin last night told me that although I hadn't qualified for Gold status, I came close, so they were giving it to me anyway and this would provide me with automatic Virgin Blue lounge membership. My thought process was: "hmm… that's interesting. Maybe I might consider flying Virgin Blue slightly more often if I get to use their lounge before flights" (as this is the other reason I fly Qantas: very cheap Qantas Club membership through PBL Media's corporate membership.)

Here's the email:

And then an hour later, this one arrives:

Hi Daniel Velocity Membership Number: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Oops! You've received our previous email titled "You've turned gold" by mistake, please disregard the free upgrade communication as unfortunately you do not qualify for that upgrade. We also note that you have elected to opt out of Velocity Communications. Please accept our sincere apologies for sending these emails to you without your consent. Unfortunately the email was extended to our entire database by mistake. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Warm regards, The Velocity Team

While I can sympathise with Virgin Blue's plight a bit (extending free lounge membership to their ENTIRE FREQUENT FLYER BASE would be a very expensive mistake), I can only say that their handling of the correction is attrocious. It doesn't take a marketing expert to know that you don't tell customers how much you value them, only to turn around just long enough for the warm glow to have sunk in, and then tell them that you don't really value them that much after all.

I think at the very least a token restitution should have been made by Virgin Blue for the mistake — an allocation of frequent flyer points for each member perhaps, or some bonus status credits to help all those basic members a small way along the track towards becoming the gold member that they thought they already were — for a moment.

One wonders also what spam and trade practices laws they've tripped by sending out an (incorrect) offer to their entire email base, including people who have asked not to receive Virgin Blue frequent flyer emails.

All I can say is: epic fail.

Mumbrella has a great post on this debacle with some interesting debate too: Airline blunder upgrades every passenger