You'll find me about 11,000 miles away.

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Since 1st November, I have been growing a 'tache. The 2 pictures on the right prove it. You can sponsor me here; h ttp://au.movember.com/mospace/1215106/ I have been thinking about what styles of moustache to grow. But my lack of ability to grow facial hair hampers my choice of styles. A lot. Maybe I could grow a handle bar moustache like the Australian icon Chopper. I could even go for maybe one like Bruce from Family Guy and each time I see my 'tache giggling to myself remembering this...... "Jeffery, Peter Griffin has a moustache.....No wayyyy.......Wayyyyy!" Or maybe just the pubescent boy look. My facial hair could probably just about manage that. Oh, I've also ot a few shouts out. Maximum respect to, etc. Pirate radio style. A shout out to the Jonni 5 Cru and to Chris and Geo locked on. Hold tight and keep it locked. And a shout out to Chi and Amy Twittering, watching The Apprentice, administering websites and making lovely things! ----------- A side note, ...

The final day of this challenge and it went pretty well. From the picture, you can see that I succeeded with more than 3 hours still left to go. Success! However, yesterday I mentioned that I would connect a PlayStation 3 via my phone to the PlayStation Network. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do this despite downloading some awesome software called Connectify . It enables Windows 7 OS computers to turn itself into a wireless router. I was quite impressed with the documentation on the software that was available and quite a few sites seem to have good things to say about it. I was quite pleased to actually find an application that does all the setup for you (previous Windows OSes didn't seem to have any software available). Anyway, it worked quite well (well, I was able to connect to the Network I created), but I was unable to connect to the PlayStation network. It failed with a selection of error messages; from a DNS error message to a message about the WPA key being incorrect....

Day 5 of The Phone Balance Challenge. A $7.97 decrease since yesterday. Not much phone credit got used yesterday or today. The last day tomorrow. I was wondering what I could do to mark this occasion. I might try and connect to the PlayStation Network. 384kbps should be ok for playing games.

My alarm on my phone woke me up this morning. I turned it off and noticed that I had a text message waiting. It was a message from 3 informing me that I need to top up as my phone balance was low. A good sign for the achievement of my challenge. As of 7:45am this morning I had loss of $232.44 from yesterday! This was much better than expected. The secret of my success…last night I connected my phone to my laptop, and used the phones 3G connection to power the Internet traffic on my computer. Genius. Last night the 3 network participated in some grid computing and also some “reciprocal” grid computing (aka Torrent sharing). But I got too carried away. It all happened while I was sleeping too. I had connected my phone to my computer, setup the grid software and let the phone provide me with some bandwidth (I was getting like 5k/sec though so whether I did anything useful is debatable), set up a few Torrents, and went to lie down. Before I did so though I checked my balance, and ...

This is my phone balance as of 7am this morning. At last, a decrease. $38.23 to be exact. Mainly due to streaming Bassdrive for most of the day. This did seem to be an efficient method to drain my balance, but not too great (it cost me maybe $24 for 6 hours of streaming i think). I also installed SymTorrent for my phone, and after many failed attempts at downloading and installing, it finally worked (note, if anyone has a Nokia e series phone, certificate signing is pretty strict, so you need to turn it off). But downloading torrents over 3g doesn't work...after getting my hopes up...maybe torrent sharing is blocked by 3, as I got it to work via wi-fi.... Anyway, I've had to settle for streaming. Anything. It sort of goes against the rules I set though. I don't actually get to keep what I stream. I tried recording what I was listening to but no joy.  And there's another limitation which is also pretty frustrating: battery life. I was downloading and streaming y...

So I woke up this morning and checked my balance. Yesterday at 12:30pm I checked it and it was down to 267. W00t. A good start. Another 7 hours left today at least of phone credit spending. But another storm happened and 3G wouldn't work. Oh well I thought on the train home from work, $13 dollars isn't that bad. It could be worse. And this morning from the picture you can see that things are worse. I'm not sure how I managed it. An INCREASE of $1.82. An increase!! How?! It's a very kind and generous gesture of 3, but this isn't a game!

Good morning! A few weeks ago I bought a new phone from phone network 3. A Nokia e63 . It was on a prepay basis so I topped up with the second most highest available top up; $69. I didn't really know the timescales of this budget, so I chose to aim for the higher end of the phone credit scale. Better safe than sorry. But I didn't realise the full extent of what I had just purchased. I had not bought $69 of simple phone credit. I had bought a $69 phone package . It included money to spend in 3's mobile zone, an amount of money to spend on reduced-rate international calls, internet usage, SMS and the normal phone calls! This is awesome. Plus 3 's service is brilliant. I get great reception everywhere. Anyway, back to my original theme. The challenge. 3 had given me a massive 500 and something AUD to spend in one month. "Great, what I'll do is rinse out some YouTube (but only moderately, as there is that warning at the start that says 'may involve high dat...