Provoke Solutions, where I work, won the premier ‘Partner Solution of the Year’ award last Thursday at the 2007 New Zealand Microsoft Partner Awards. We also took out the “Business Productivity Solution” award and were narrowly edged by IGA Systems in the ‘Microsoft Technology Advocates’ award.

Congratulations to everyone that worked on the projects and behind the scenes to make this possible. It’s stuff like this that makes me proud to be a Provoker!

Congratulations also to Rod and the team over at Xero who took out the ‘Small Business Partner Solution’ of the Year and ‘Software Solution of the Year’. It’s great to see another Drury start-up doing so well so quickly having been involved in one myself.

First up, has it really been 6 months? Really??? WOW! Time sure fly’s!

Well anyway…

I’m in the market for a new laptop and as such I’ve been out on the interwebs diligently doing my research, trying to find that ideal (read: perfect) candidate. I have fairly simple criteria, needing a higher than average spec machine (cutting rather than bleeding edge), large fast hard drive, plenty of ram and a WSXGA screen… that’s 1680×1059, with a decent GFX card.

First up, you have no idea what a tough ask the screen seems to be! Most manufacturers, Apple included, seem to limit this resolution to the 17″ models which are, to put it mildly, rather less than portable and hardly “laptops”, anything in the 13″ – 15.4″ realm is generally limited to the lower 1280 x 800 WXGA resolution which just doesn’t cut it when you live in pallete intensive applications like Photoshop, Fireworks and Visual Studio. I would also like the exterior to be reasonably attractive… or at the very least not ugly!

With the above said I can already hear the cries of “Buy a Mac!” coming from every corner. It seems most of my colleagues are indeed using Macs when not at work but I have long since accepted my fate as a Windows user, and to my surprise, with a few glaring exceptions Vista really isn’t as bad as I imagined it would be (No really!).

The unfortunate downside to looking for a Windows based machine however is the total lack of focus on the hardware design. When compared to the latest Apple hardware, with it clean sleek lines, beautifully beveled edges and spectacular attention to detail I find even the nicest looking PC’s are left desperately wanting.

Compaq‘s have been trying to copy the Apple design formula for a while now with absolutly no success, the HP and Toshiba lineups are, well, neat and tidy (read: boring!). Acer and Asus have both tried branding partnership with Farrari and Lambourghini respectively, the results of which are amusing if nothing else. Sony seem to be trying with their Vaio’s and as for Dell… lets just say if you put lipstick on a pig… it’s still just a pig. Dell have made one move in the right direction however, with their new XPS1330 but they seriously need to start applying that design thinking across their mainstream laptops and not just the ultra portables.

So what did I settle on you ask? I caved and I’m going with a Dell Vostro 1500. It’s not pretty, even among some of it’s competitors, but the bang for buck ratio is good, it meets most if not all of my other requirements and it was a more favourable option than its ugly step-sister the Inspiron 1520 with it’s clown makeup… I mean “colour faceplates”.

I’ll let you know how it works out!

When Telecom announced their “Go Large” plan I was there in a heart beat… it’s what I’ve been hanging out for since the dawn of the Internet! OK, since the dawn of broadband perhaps. The promise of unlimited bandwidth, even with the fair use policy, and decent speed (outside of “Peak Periods”) seemed too good to be true…

***NEWS FLASH***

It is!!!

When the plan was conceived and cast upon the public only a couple weeks ago the fair use policy stated that you could not download more than 700MB’s during the peak hours of 4pm and 12am which is indeed “Fair”. I download reasonably heavily via Bittorrent and am more than happy to keep this downloading outside these peak hours. The policy also stated that traffic such as this may be limited which again is fair enough, I don’t mind that downloads take a little longer within reason.

Well, two weeks in and the policy has been updated, for wholesale at least and I imagine Xtra will follow suit in the next few days. The policy now states, along with the existing restrictions, that you may not download more than 200MB’s in any one hour. Is it me, or does that sound like an overall limit? Rather than having a monthly limit you now have an hourly one! Fantastic!

The new limitation doesn’t appear to be tied to peer to peer downloads either so Mums and Dads this means you too! Want to download that 400Mb game demo? better make sure your download manager keeps it slow!

Full Speed ADSL on the Telecom network, assuming you are a reasonable distance from the exchange is 300Kb/s – 400Kb/s at which speeds you could effectively download between 1.1Gb’s and 1.4Gb’s an hour. This would no doubt put an intolerableable amount of strain on the network most probably crippling other users, so some limitation is only fair. 200Mb’s an hour however, equates to a download spead of just 55Kb/s which is about one 6th of the product being sold (and that you are paying for). So what Telecom are in effect saying is that you can use the network at full spead, but only for about 10 minutes in any given hour. In reality this is all moot as the best speeds I have seen even outside the peek periods are not even close to what the network should be capable of and I’m close to the exchange!

What annoys me most about this is not so much the draconian limitations, that I at least expected, but the fact that Telecom are alowed to sell the service as being “unlimited”, making a huge song and dance in thier sales pitch when in fact the service is VERY limited. If it’s not unlimited don’t call it unlimited!

This morning at 5am I awoke to the sound of a txt message from family in the UK… it read "Just heard on our TV that a possible tsunami is heading your way…". A little worrying one might say.

I know it was the middle of the night here and that this was no doubt "breaking news" on the evening news programs in the northern hemisphere but I was stunned by the complete lack of coverage provided by the NZ media. The only news I was able to view to find out what was happening was BBC World and Australia's Sky News (and they're at least 2 hours behind us so that kinda kills the "middle of the night" argument!).

While I don't subscribe to the CNN theory of taking next to no information and recycling it for hours, it would be nice if the media here actually took enough interest to keep people informed… all we got was a brief "there was an earthquake near Tonga and we may have got a tsunami" on the 6am news!

As it turns out thankfully there was no tsunami, well not a big damage causing one at least, and the warning was cancelled, but this highlights just how vulnerable we are on this little rock in the South Pacific. Makes you stop and think…