After a tedium filled day at work, where I spent a little bit of time with someone from IT-Assist (helpdesk) twiddle with my netbook to try and get it connected to the Eduroam network, we finally discovered that the reason why I couldn't get VPN to work prior to this was because my account was locked at -12 cents. My account had been locked at some point in 2007, but it was still active since I was staff. So, after a little rigmarole with the online payment method, I paid $1.00 into the system for a total balance of +63 cents (25 cent transaction fee). This then unlocked my account that allowed me to use VPN and the Eduroam. The downside is that the Eduroam STILL needs VPN and that defeats the point of having Eduroam..... If you don't understand it, I'll explain a little more, otherwise skip the next paragraph lol.
Eduroam means Education Roaming. It is a network of academic institutions in 22 countries that have signed agreements to provide internet access to academics and students from visiting institutions that participate in the program. So if I was visiting a place in Taiwan who supported Eduroam, I could log in with my University of Sydney account and access the internet via their university wireless, and vice versa. This is meant to reduce the issues of issuing and assigning accounts for visitors, which generates paperwork, protocol, waiting time and so on. So, I could turn up, put my details into my laptop and get connected straight away without needing to talk to their IT people for an access account. The problem that we encountered today at Engineering Link using the Eduroam network was, it didn't work without VPN. VPN is a virtual private network, which allows wireless access via issued and authorised accounts. Anyone can connect to the University of Sydney wireless, but they can not authenticate to outside the university, so are bound only to local content. Then, by deduction, if you have to use VPN to access Eduroam, it defeats the purpose of Eduroam because you have to be issued with an account to access VPN, so you can use the "account-less" Eduroam.... get it? Anyway, the IT guy helping me was dumbstruck at how messed up that was, so he called up someone at the main lab to log the issue haha. Good to know I'm helping them sort their bugs....
After that, I did a tiny bit of writing and then heading into town. A friend needed some company for distracting purposes, so he arranged for some people to meet up and play games at Norita, the board games and cafe place on Liverpool St in the city. By the time I had got there, they had been playing Guess Who, and also had a set of Jenga and were eating some icecream/blended ice thing. I must say, Guess Who has evolved much since I played it last. Now the board sits up without a divider, there are electronic buttons to flash red and green to indicate yes or no, and you can change the guessing sets from the original people to animals, kids, household goods, and other things. It's pretty nifty but still the same old premise of asking yes/no questions and eliminating to guess your opponents choice.
Jenga was also pretty fun and I've never actually played it before but I had a good idea of what was the purpose and the issues at hand with it. We made some pretty crazy structures that held quite well actually. We did many rounds of it and I only lost once, while some of my placements caused other people to fail several times just because they felt up to the challenging of stacking onto my placements LOL.
Post Norita, we wandered around quite a bit to look for dinner before we settled on Menya. It's located underneath the Prince Centre just off the Haymarket Market City complex. It's a sub-ground eatery that specialises primarily in Ramen. Well, they had standard ramen for $9.50, then they had their house specialty with double the ramen content for $15.90 called the Menya Mega Ramen. They have another size ontop which is a "challenge" ramen, where if you finish it in 30 minutes, you get it for free. The ramen is $29.95, and has 4x the standard ramen and weighs 2kg. Well, after not being defeated by the Mega ramen and it's 2x, I can tell you, there is no way in hell I would ever try the challenge. I finished the Mega ramen in about 25 minutes and I was stuffed as, and by technicality, I didn't finish the whole thing because I still had soup left. I ate everything else though. I would definitely bust a gut doing the challenge. But, the ramen was very good. The Menya Ramen has stewed hard boiled egg, a beautifully cooked soft and dissolvable slice of roasted tonkatsu (pork), two peices of chicken karage (fried chicken), bean sprouts, preserved bamboo shoots and a big peice of nori (seaweed) in a very rich broth. Very yum, well worth the money in my opinion.
So after dinner, I took a slowish walk back to uni where my car was parked, and I saw some guys still in the lab, at 8pm, so I went in and had a chat to them, and told them to home, or go out and stop being in the lab on a Friday night so late LOL. One of them is married too! I said, sheesh, don't leave your wife at home waiting for you, and he said, it's ok, she's used to my bad habits hahaha. Then I drove home and filled up the tank and tyres on the way. I was a bit annoyed though because I managed to get caught on every single light nearly so my trip was very slow and stop start unfortunately.
Tomorrow is the first Kendo training after a three week break. I think I'm going to die from it LOL...
Oh, and if you got Rick-Rolled by my post and the Singstar link, :P The reason is because there is that specific song in Singstar and it was sung very well by someone at the social gathering, so I thought I'd at least try to roll someone again :D Sowwy if you got rolled~
Eduroam means Education Roaming. It is a network of academic institutions in 22 countries that have signed agreements to provide internet access to academics and students from visiting institutions that participate in the program. So if I was visiting a place in Taiwan who supported Eduroam, I could log in with my University of Sydney account and access the internet via their university wireless, and vice versa. This is meant to reduce the issues of issuing and assigning accounts for visitors, which generates paperwork, protocol, waiting time and so on. So, I could turn up, put my details into my laptop and get connected straight away without needing to talk to their IT people for an access account. The problem that we encountered today at Engineering Link using the Eduroam network was, it didn't work without VPN. VPN is a virtual private network, which allows wireless access via issued and authorised accounts. Anyone can connect to the University of Sydney wireless, but they can not authenticate to outside the university, so are bound only to local content. Then, by deduction, if you have to use VPN to access Eduroam, it defeats the purpose of Eduroam because you have to be issued with an account to access VPN, so you can use the "account-less" Eduroam.... get it? Anyway, the IT guy helping me was dumbstruck at how messed up that was, so he called up someone at the main lab to log the issue haha. Good to know I'm helping them sort their bugs....
After that, I did a tiny bit of writing and then heading into town. A friend needed some company for distracting purposes, so he arranged for some people to meet up and play games at Norita, the board games and cafe place on Liverpool St in the city. By the time I had got there, they had been playing Guess Who, and also had a set of Jenga and were eating some icecream/blended ice thing. I must say, Guess Who has evolved much since I played it last. Now the board sits up without a divider, there are electronic buttons to flash red and green to indicate yes or no, and you can change the guessing sets from the original people to animals, kids, household goods, and other things. It's pretty nifty but still the same old premise of asking yes/no questions and eliminating to guess your opponents choice.
Jenga was also pretty fun and I've never actually played it before but I had a good idea of what was the purpose and the issues at hand with it. We made some pretty crazy structures that held quite well actually. We did many rounds of it and I only lost once, while some of my placements caused other people to fail several times just because they felt up to the challenging of stacking onto my placements LOL.
Post Norita, we wandered around quite a bit to look for dinner before we settled on Menya. It's located underneath the Prince Centre just off the Haymarket Market City complex. It's a sub-ground eatery that specialises primarily in Ramen. Well, they had standard ramen for $9.50, then they had their house specialty with double the ramen content for $15.90 called the Menya Mega Ramen. They have another size ontop which is a "challenge" ramen, where if you finish it in 30 minutes, you get it for free. The ramen is $29.95, and has 4x the standard ramen and weighs 2kg. Well, after not being defeated by the Mega ramen and it's 2x, I can tell you, there is no way in hell I would ever try the challenge. I finished the Mega ramen in about 25 minutes and I was stuffed as, and by technicality, I didn't finish the whole thing because I still had soup left. I ate everything else though. I would definitely bust a gut doing the challenge. But, the ramen was very good. The Menya Ramen has stewed hard boiled egg, a beautifully cooked soft and dissolvable slice of roasted tonkatsu (pork), two peices of chicken karage (fried chicken), bean sprouts, preserved bamboo shoots and a big peice of nori (seaweed) in a very rich broth. Very yum, well worth the money in my opinion.
So after dinner, I took a slowish walk back to uni where my car was parked, and I saw some guys still in the lab, at 8pm, so I went in and had a chat to them, and told them to home, or go out and stop being in the lab on a Friday night so late LOL. One of them is married too! I said, sheesh, don't leave your wife at home waiting for you, and he said, it's ok, she's used to my bad habits hahaha. Then I drove home and filled up the tank and tyres on the way. I was a bit annoyed though because I managed to get caught on every single light nearly so my trip was very slow and stop start unfortunately.
Tomorrow is the first Kendo training after a three week break. I think I'm going to die from it LOL...
Oh, and if you got Rick-Rolled by my post and the Singstar link, :P The reason is because there is that specific song in Singstar and it was sung very well by someone at the social gathering, so I thought I'd at least try to roll someone again :D Sowwy if you got rolled~
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