As much as I’ve whined about Optus’ paltry data plans, they’re the best things going in this, the arse end of the world. Much of the buying public seems to agree. Vodafone and Telstra shops next door to the Optus shop I was at were pretty empty.

I am now an Optus customer. So far, I’ve been with Vodafone, AAPT, Vodafone again and now Optus. I also have a 3 MobileBroadband card.

I started a contract for a 16gb iPhone Friday afternoon. I would have been able to walk away with an 8gb model if I wanted to. The 16gb models sold out instantly in most Optus stores. A small number of stores still had 8gb models, but 16gb seemed to be sold out pretty much everywhere.

Big upside for Optus here. I think they’re gaining a lot of new activations because of their relatively aggressive iPhone plan pricing. In just talking with people in the shops, more than half of the people getting iPhones with Optus are churning from another provider. What’s more, their plans have a nice deal where you’re allowed free 5-minute calls to other mobile numbers within the same account. Because of this, I’m bringing the other two mobiles in my family along with us – they were prepaid on Vodafone, and now they will be on Optus caps. I don’t think I’m unique in this regard either.

As an aside, I learnt that a 3G USIM is backwards compatible with 2G phones. I put the new Optus USIM into my old Siemens S55, and it’s working fine. Reception in my house is better than Vodafone was (no surprise there).

Gizmondo Australia has some leaked Vodafone pricing and it’s horrible. Makes Optus look good.

How can you offer 5gb of data for $39 and charge more than four times that when the data is coming from a phone? As much as I ridiculed Optus, they might have won themselves a new customer.

Unless Telstra’s plans are reasonably priced.

(Hahahaha!)

Remember a year or so ago when Telstra relaunched sensis.com.au as “The Search Engine for Australians”? No? Not many people do, and not many people actually use the thing. It’s fairly bad. But when it was introduced, they trotted out some project manager who said something totally bizarre like “In a year we will be bigger than Google in Australia.”

I wish I would have kept that story, because they’re doing it again. Not against Google, mind you, but against eBay. They’re repurposing the TradingPost website into some kind of auction site, undercutting eBay’s prices.

“We’re very confident that Australians know us, they trust us, (and because) we have a comprehensive service that has more features, more choice, more flexibility than elsewhere, we think we’re on a match winner here.” (Bruce Akhurst, chief executive of Sensis)

There was no way they would have succeeded against Google, and there’s very little chance they will succeed against eBay. eBay isn’t great – in fact it’s pretty bad – but Sensis’s offering is just too little, too late. Nice try. Bzzzt. Next player please.

Huh? What? Hello? Vodafone? iPhone! Australia? Yes! 3G? Dunno. What? Where did this story come from? What about all the SingTel/Optus rumours? The dark horse, the Vodahorse comes out from, well, the darkness, and announces that they’re some kind of wild worldwide partner. It won’t be for the existing iPhone, because Voda’s networks in most of those ten countries doesn’t support EVDO. It’s going to have to be a 3G unit, at least in Australia. When? Dunno. No one’s saying. But damn right I signed up. I’m with Voda already, and I was planning to use my unlocked 3G iPhone, bought from wherever, on their network anyway.

So what does this mean for an unlocked 3G iPhone? Will it happen, or will Apple continue with their not-so-successful program of locking the phone to a certain network? I’m hoping they’ll do what every other mobile company does, and that is provide locking as an option to the network reseller, but make unlocking a relatively painless process that won’t be destroyed whenever a software upgrade comes down the spout.

Not that I want to jinx it with a pre-announcement, but (pending official letter), I’ve just become a provisional Permanent Resident of this sunburnt country. This means that I’m kind of on probation for two years, following that I’ll become an actual Permanent Resident, and they’re stuck with me. I’m celebrating with a Coopers Pale Ale. Cheers!

Australia has its own search engine. Did you know that? It’s called Sensis and it was launched a little over a year ago, to great fanfare. At the time, one of their people said something like “In a year’s time, we’ll have caught up to and beaten Google in Australia”.

Pause. Silence. In the distance, a cricket chirps. People realise he’s serious and start laughing.

Right, so that was a year ago, and I was trying to find the exact quote to do the usual point and laugh thing, but I couldn’t find it (although I wasn’t looking terribly hard). I did find something even better though:

click make big

When you do a Google search for sensis beating google one of the results, from the Sensis page, is all about panic attacks.

Also, please note the far cleaner syntax of the Google search link as compared to the Sensis one. I wonder how much playing around one can do with that URL? Hmm.

Our apology today is not the first time we’ve felt sorry and said it. Arthur Phillip, first governor of New South Wales, showed rare-for-the-time insight into how Australia’s native people felt about this invasion of sunburnt Englishmen:

“I am sorry to have been so long without knowing more of these people… they certainly are not pleased with our remaining among them.” (Arthur Phillip, 1788, on the Aboriginal people of Australia)

Shame he didn’t really seem to do anything about it, things could have been quite different.

Moo Brew, from the Moorilla Estate winery, produces a very decent range of beers. Their pale ale is really quite nice – a bit more bitter than many pales, but refreshing nevertheless. I’m looking forward to the warmer months when pale ales really come into their own as good refreshing backyard beers.

Their beers are good, right… but their beer mats are bloody brilliant:

Check this breaking news from Australia Customs. It seems that a certain Mr Potato Head was caught smuggling Ecstasy into the country in his back storage compartment.

“Mr Potato Head appeared inconsistent on the x-ray – looked rather blotchy – and that caused us to look at that further,” said David Laffan (yes, his real name) from the Customs service.

I managed to get in touch with Mr Head, in his jail cell, where he gave me a statement: “I’ve been set up, man! Look at me! I can’t even reach my back compartment. Someone slipped the pills in there while I was sleeping on the plane. It’s not mine!”

When asked about the “blotchy” quote, he muttered something about a skin condition and hung up on jurgen dot ca.

I ask you though, gentle reader: look at this guy. Does he look like he’s on E?

Um… Okay, well, maybe it’s a bad angle.

I’m a sucker for a good analogy. When I explain complicated concepts to people, I often make use of analogies, as they frequently turn a difficult or foreign concept into something that anyone can grasp. By using something that people are already familiar with on a cultural level, odd and unusual concepts can be more easily communicated.

I also appreciate when other people use analogies – the more apt, the better. For example, in the second-last paragraph of an article in today’s The Age about Melbn’s poorly-run metropolitan train network, union boss Terry Sheedy compares the train system to an institution that many Australians are familiar with, on a cultural level. He gets awarded the jurgen dot ca “Analogy of the week” award. Congratulations. Meet me at the Railway for a pint.