I have been in Perth this week, which for those who don’t know is the capital of Western Australia and a 4hr flight from my home in Melbourne. This was to work on a fairly major problem so long hours mostly at the customer site. In a geek tragedy the hotel i was staying at had potentially the worst Internet access I have ever encountered. While they claimed they had both wired and wireless broadband, connecting to anything ended up being an exercise in futility. Apparently they were having problems with their provider.
In the end my only connection to the outside world was a dial up connection to works VPN. This was less than ideal. It managed to keep me up to date with my email but not much else. This was particularly frustrating as it limited my ability to do my job. Being in a technical field working on a customers issue I really needed to get a lot of technical documents which was taking large amounts of time.
I didn’t really learn anything from this experience but it seriously annoyed me and I felt the need to vent.
On a side note it has been nice to see the concern expressed by GNC listeners and some of the other blogs and podcasts for those affected by the fires over here. I am a suburbs guy so my family and I were safe from the direct effects, however I have a good friend who lost his home and entire farm in Steels Creek and I have another friend who is in danger from one of the fires still burning. While we in Australia take bush fires as a natural part of summer the sheer ferocity and speed of what transpired last Saturday was frightening. I hope all of my fellow Victorian GNC readers, as well as any SA or NSW readers and their families have been safe from the fires.