Ken spots an iPod in London, pilfered unashamedly by John Larkin.

One of my best mates, Ken, is in London. He seems to be having a great time. Check out his posts as well as his explorations of Apple centres across two continents here. Some time back Ken and I travelled to Thailand together. There is an excellent picture of us together in Thailand here.

The Amazing Kornyfone Record Label, originally uploaded by John Larkin.

This two album set brought together a collection of rarities from the world of recorded music. The Amazing Kornyfone Record Label was a bootleg record label that produced vinyl albums of rare and hard to find recordings. Artists that were bootlegged by TAKRL included the Beatles, Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Deep Purple, Bruce Springsteen and others.

Dr. Terrence H. Tellyfone., originally uploaded by John Larkin.

The Amazing Kornyfone Record Label operated out of Anytown in the USA and was the brainchild of the late Dr. Terrence H. Tellyfone, Art Gnuvo and Deek Kibard. There is a short history of the TAKRL record label here. A history of bootlegs can be found at the Hotwacks web site. Please check out the entire album and eight page TAKRL discography here.

The Southern Cross, originally uploaded by John Larkin.

The Southern Cross. This is one of the first constellations learnt by children in Australia. If you can find the Southern Cross in the night sky then you know your are looking towards the south. The vertical axis of this constellation points towards the South Celestial Pole. It is usually way up there with Orion and Scorpio in terms of the constellations initially picked up by kids in the Southern Hemisphere. This is of course before the advent of the Simpsons, Playstations and the Internet. I took some photographs of the night sky and, using Photoshop, managed to make the constellation a little more visible. Check out the rest of the story, complete with links to great astronomical images and maps of the southern sky, here.

Nan Tien Temple, originally uploaded by John Larkin.

Shao Ping and I visited the Nan Tien Temple with three friends recently. It is an island of culture and interest in an otherwise bleak landscape.

birds, originally uploaded by John Larkin.

Shao Ping and I were at the Kiama Blowhole some weeks back and we saw two seagulls on a fence. Each seagull only had one leg. That was amusing in itself. Then, in a random act, I cloned the seagull on the right and gave him three buddies. The seagull on the far left cannot believe it either.

Well, one of the rare things that irks in life is my wife’s use of the Windows based operating system. We have spent the last two days trying to ensure that the wireless LAN connection on her new laptop is not flaky. Drop-outs are frequent and the laptop is almost constantly attempting to “acquire an IP address”. Oh, Shao Ping, please let me buy you a mac next time. Typing Chinese (traditional) is easier on a PC however.

Surfed the web attempting to get answers provided some ideas. It also confirmed that we were doing the right thing. But we still had no joy. Speaking of joy, our exchange student, Joye also had problems connecting her laptop to the wireless network and we enlisted the aid of one of her fellow students. he is coming around tonight to assist us with Shao Ping’s new laptop.

Connecting the Mac to the WLAN was effortless. No problem. Easy. No stress. In fact I have connected the Mac to countless WLANS at work, friend’s places, hot spots in fast food joints, etc, no problem.

So, in the meantime, Shao Ping’s laptop is connected to the Airport base station using Ethernet LAN. That works.

I should not let it stress me as I am a bit of a stress head but when I start opening all of the countless ‘networking’, ‘properties’ and ‘advanced’ nested dialogue boxes in Windows (XP and 2000, etc) I feel like a proctologist performing a colonoscopy. There is so much crap inside the Windows OS. I wonder if Bill Gates needs to see a proctologist? Should be called Windows XPoo.