Felipe Alvarez's blog

We’ve been getting used to the public transit system here. We hopped onto the train at Geebung station and rode it all the way to Toowong station, where we got off. We headed to ProRentals, where were added some important letters of reference to our already-submitted applications.

RENATA TAKE NOTE. You were my previous landlord (only me), as was Kevin Turino.

We looked at another place yesterday at 72 Warren Street, St Lucia, only two blocks away from UQ (University of Queensland) where EV is going to study. She doesn’t need to take a bus to school. But I may have to take a bus to work, if I can find a job outside of St Lucia (like Toowong or something). If I find word in St Lucia, I may be able to walk or bicycle. I wonder if a small gas-powered scooter will be less money than a montly bus pass …

Well, we submitted the application to 72 Warren St, as well as one week deposit. If we change our minds, we lose the deposit, but we want to show we are seriuos about the place — which we are. So we gave them $185 for week 1, and submitted two letters of reference from previous landlords (Renata Moreno and Kevin Turino), as well as a supporting document from parents Rocio and Ruben, all of which will greatly help strengthen our application, and imporve our chances of getting into that room. $185/week isn’t bad. Divide by two and we only pay $92.5 per person/week. This will probably be paid fortnightly (every two weeks) via automatic payments from Chequing account.

In addition to finding places to live and work, I’ve been doing some (free) computer repairs. Because they are keeping me here for free, I thought I could contribute back for free. They have all been very nice to us. First was EV’s cousing Aaron. His notebook was crashing before even presenting a windows desktop. We loaded openSUSE LiveCD on it, and it brought us to a nice GUI with networking etc. We backed up his important pictures and music to my 500GB drive I bought in Canada just before leaving. To my surprise, there was a recovery partition on the drive, which allowed me to resinstall Windows XP Home to factory settings easily. Anti-virus, spybot S&D, spywareblaster, K-lite Codec Pack, firefox, CCleaner, Service Pack 3, windows updates — and she was good as new (long list!).

Then came Uncle John’s HP mini-note 2133 pre-installed with vista. Because of the VIA C7-M processor inside, vista ran slower than frozen molasses on the minute gravity of a small moon (meaning it was really slow). HP 2133 Guide was an invaluable resource to help me install Windows XP on the little netbook. Some “chinese” copies proved useless since they were all pre-SP2 which was an explicit pre-requisite. I dug out a copy from a binder I had brought with me, and it installed relatively easily after that. I am creating an install guide to help others in the future make the “upgrade” easier.