Check out the new car I bought with money I’m supposed to be living on (this is not the actual car of course, but at least the same model & color)

After I paid for it the finance person explained that I would have been better off taking out a loan and paying it off in installments, and everything she said seemed to make perfect sense… but now I can’t quite get the logic right– I’m going to have to work it out myself at some point.

And my second big purchase, but at least more justifiable given my profession, the 27″ iMac with Core i5 (nice chip naming Intel, you suck-up)

As nice as the machine is (and it is very nice) I do have a bit of a problem with Apple’s weird choice of wireless keyboard as standard now. Note the lack of numeric keypad and standard cursor keys– is Apple trying to kill the Home, End and Delete keys altogether rather than just admit they have been totally wrong all these years about the way they should function? That’s my theory…

I received some nice feedback today on Drivey, and decided it was time I collected some of the emails I’ve received over the years and post them here, at least in part to inspire me to revisit the project.

The demo is getting very very old now, and has been downloaded anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000 times since being slashdotted back in 2005. What I was always delighted with was the degree to which people seemed to “get it” and not be particularly bothered by the fact that there was no particular point or goal. So many simply appreciated it for what it was and didn’t seem to expect anything more, and I was surprised at how rarely people tried to tell me what I should do next.

Here, in roughly reverse chronological order, and only slightly abridged, are some of the nice and/or interesting comments I’ve received.

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I am from Malaysia and I really love your work on Drivey Graphical Demo. I have downloaded all two latest executable and .scr file from your website. I also really enjoyed all four environment type that included in Drivey. Since I have Drivey, I cannot stop myself from staring at my monitor that can make me calm and a bit resting from any tension during my daily work. Maybe sooner if you have an improvement for this demo I wish I can be the earliest person who knows about it. Your Drivey runs perfectly on my Windows Vista Basic. Thank you very much for a light application like this but give a big enjoyment for me as a user. Keep up a good work! :]

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Sorry to regular readers for the dead air these last couple of weeks, I have been moving around a lot and don’t have a non-shitty computer at the moment. I recently returned to Australia after my 4.5 year stint in Auckland, and am currently visiting my old home town of Murwillumbah, a once sleepy town which is now thriving with new cafes and restaurants opening up all over the place. It is very warm & humid here, but then I should have expected that (I hate the heat, perhaps even more now than I used to).

This year will be an interesting one; the more people ask me what exactly I’m planning to do the more I tend to answer “iPhone programming and updating my old software”. Although I am completely untethered at the moment, with no job or permanent address, the idea of heading off on a world tour strangely doesn’t appeal right now. I’m not the adventurer type, preferring to visit a place by actually living there since it takes me a while to get comfortable in a place, and I hate feeling like a tourist (especially a privileged Western one). Maybe I should just buy an old bus and live in it, as my sister Bindi does…

(I should point out that the reason for the old fridge there is that she just pulled it out to replace it with a new one)