Get Office 2010 cheaper if you’re a uni student

If you’re an Australian university student thinking about Windows 7 or Office 2010, the “It’s not cheating” website has recently updated. It’s Not Cheating is a Microsoft initiative to reduce piracy among uni students by giving them low cost full versions of software, like Office and Windows. At the moment, if you have a valid uni email ID, you can grab Office 2010 Professional Academic for AUD$99.

Office Professional Academic 2010

Contrast that with the $199 you would pay for Office Home and Student, which has doesn’t have Publisher, Outlook or Access. Professional Academic is essentially Office Professional (which costs $899) at half the cost of Home & Student, with the caveat being that you have to be a student when you buy it.

In addition, Windows 7 Professional Upgrade, which has been around $120 on the same site since around April, has been dropped down to $49.95. You won’t get a legitimate copy of either for cheaper anywhere else. So if you’re a uni student who will eventually upgrade to office 2010 / windows 7, go get it before the price increases.

UPDATE: If you’re unsure about whether you should buy office 2010 or not, Lifehacker has a great guide with lots of info.

Empire Avenue: Where ‘buying your friends’ is a good thing

I’ve just received an invite to a service that’s currently in beta, Empire Avenue. To explain what the service is, I first need to explain ‘influence’. As you do things online, on social networks and blogs, you affect a graph of influence. For example, I post online that I liked a restaurant in Perth. My friends/followers hear that and some of them may be influenced to go there. In addition, they may pass that influence on to some of their friends/followers. That’s free advertising for the restaurant purely from my influence. The more people that you can reach / convince, the larger your influence is (p.s. That’s the super simple explanation, there’s more to it than that but beyond the needs of this post). This works for places, movies, music, events, software, and pretty much anything that people think about recommendations before they choose to try.

Empire Avenue is an online virtual ’stock exchange’, where the companies are people/websites and their value is determined by their online social influence. You can buy and sell shares in your friends or other people or even brands / websites. When you start off, you have an initial influence value, and a small amount of money to buy shares with. To increase your value, the system needs to know how influential you are.

Read more

Google Maps April Fools Fun

The maps team for Australia have come up with a really good prank. Search for directions in Australia and look at the results to see what I’m talking about. For those elsewhere in the world/ those who want to see the result, hit the ‘read more’ link.

Read more

Messenger for Mac 8 Beta brings video chat to the mac

Microsoft has just released the beta of Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8. This release brings audio/video chat features to the mac that have existed in windows live messenger for a while now. As always, Messenger for Mac seems like a cut down version of Windows Live Messenger, so this addition feels like a step in the right direction. It remains to be seen whether it will pull me away from using Adium. I’ll post a comparison of the 2 MSN clients in about 2 weeks, so check back for that. In the mean time, if you want to try out the beta for yourself, hit this link:

Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 Beta

A camera in hand: What I learnt from the Perth storm of 2010

Today was a big day in Perth’s history, a massive storm hit the city and caused a lot of damage and chaos. I was lucky enough not to be on the roads when it hit, I was sitting in a cosy building at my university. That didn’t last long though, because a few close thunder strikes later, the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the building and stand outside (still under a shade, but out in the cold). While we were out there, we witnessed some of the intense battering that the university buildings and trees tried to withstand. All the while, I couldn’t capture anything, because I had no camera on me, not even my point and shoot. I had my phone camera, but that didn’t really do well with the scene in front of us so I gave up with that after a few shots. I really wish I had my DSLR with me but alas, I had to just enjoy watching the events unfold.

The biggest lesson learned from today? If you don’t have a camera on you when you least expect a great moment, you’ll have to watch it pass you by. It doesn’t matter how great the camera in your closet is if you can’t use it when the (literal and metaphorical) storm hits.

Indian Traffic 101: Signs and Symbols

The first thing to understand about the Indian Traffic system is that there are no rules per se. Just suggestions. Here’s a list of suggestions that may be seen on the roads:

Read more

Malaysian airlines flight to India now boarding

My trip to India was via Kuala Lampur, on a Malaysian Airlines flight. The flights were not bad and the flight attendants were nice. On the other hand, the seats were quite cramped, even for economy class. I had a hard time getting to sleep, although that could be attributed to the lady who’s infant decided to sing to us all night. The in flight entertainment was on a tiny common screen, and the headphones had very poor audio quality, making it unbearable for me to watch. Long story short, the service was generally ok, but some things could have been better for the price of the flight.

Read more

India Trippin’

Just a quick note, I’m currently in India, so most of the posts from now will be about the things I see / hear / smell and generally experience. It’ll be a temporary break from the usual technology posts until I’m back home (except maybe a few about the tech I’m carrying with me on this trip). I’m also hoping to get a lot of photography done, so expect some posts with pictures from my travels :)

Facebook-Twitter integration: mentions and status tags

I use both Facebook and Twitter extensively, and while there have been some big steps in integrating the two platforms for users, there’s room for more. One of the important features of this integration, for me, is that the status messages that go in either direction need to be modified to match the destination platform. Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally different services, and copying a message by a user from one platform to the other should be about more than just the text that was entered.

Read more

Dropbox updates with LAN sync

One of the tools I install every time I install a new OS is Dropbox, a multi-platform file syncing service. For those who haven’t heard of it, Dropbox basically allows you to sync a folder across multiple computers connected to the internet. Any file changed on one computer, gets updated automatically on all of them. The latest build has a feature called LAN sync that I’ve been waiting for eagerly.

Read more