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Torsten Curdt’s weblog

Honey, ..it’s a station wagon!

Mitsubishi Magna Executive 2.6Yesterday I bought a car. It’s a 1995 Mitsubishi Magna Station Wagon. I am not sure whether I really going to use it to commute to work every day …but I need it for the weekends (Torquay, I am coming!) …and it feels sooo much better to have it available. Melbourne is really big! And especially when you still have to buy stuff for the apartment having a car makes things so much easier.

I have been driving quite a bit in the past 13 years that I have my drivers license …but technically …technically …it’s my first own car.

Online with full speed

A few days ago I got back my online status – DSL arrived. Hurray!! And not just that – it’s ADSL2+ …which can give you speeds up to 24MBit/s! They don’t promise you the full speed but I did have some quite fast downloads already. Awesome!

Unfortunately my old hardware doesn’t cut it. So I’ve just bought the Billion BiPAC 7402VGO. Besides the support for the next generation of DSL it comes with quite some other nice features. Traffic shaping, a full VPN and VOIP support – just to name a few. …but somehow it just does not feel as good as my old Linksys. In some area the admin interface still needs some work e.g.

Review: Brand Bjork and the Bro’s

That was an awesome concert! About 150 minutes of stoner-rock-blues at the ‘Hifi Bar’. (A very nice venue! Just the right size!) It wasn’t the wall of sound that you might have expected from the Kyuss roots but at times it was still clear where he came from. The rest of the band was professional and without an attitude – skilled and good. Unfortunately I have to say he is much better with the guitar than with vocals. But for this type of music vocals are only secondary anyway. It was a good concert, a nice crowd and a great atmosphere to see one of the former desert legends on stage. Yeah, rock baby!

Moved in

wellingtonstreetWeeks later I am now more than happy to announce – yes, I finally found a place to stay! I’ve just moved in. Locationwise not my first choice but still very nice – North St. Kilda with only a 15 minutes walk to the bay.

Frankly speaking this whole apartment finding business turned out to be a real nightmare. Honestly, it was one of the most frustrating experiences – ever! You go to an inspection and so many people show up …just open up a few brews – it could make a nice party. Unfortunetely it was far from that amusing. A single guy from overseas with no local rental history does seem to be really what everyone is looking for as a tenant.

Seriously, some things are definetely ticking differently down here. Renting is one of them. I will write up my findings in a “How to move to Melbourne” guide hoping it will help others to have a better start.

Wrapping pre-formatted text

I haven’t notitced that the long lines of my code blocks weren’t wrapping properly in firefox. In Safari everything was just fine. Adding these few lines to the css stylesheet should do the trick.


pre {
 white-space: pre-wrap;       /* css-3 */
 white-space: -moz-pre-wrap;  /* Mozilla, since 1999 */
 white-space: -pre-wrap;      /* Opera 4-6 */
 white-space: -o-pre-wrap;    /* Opera 7 */
 word-wrap: break-word;       /* Internet Explorer 5.5+ */
}

Glad I found that on this website.