Russell Coker interpreted my post about how laptops are expensive in Australia as a lazy-web request for instructions on how to buy a laptop from the US, and posted accordingly. His blog is down, so I thought I'd clear it up here: I know how to buy a laptop from another country.

It can even be much easier than he suggests: some US sellers will happily post or courier a laptop to me directly, without the need for me to find a friend about to visit Australia. And I can also get someone in the US to take the delivery and re-post it, if I need to. In any event, it comes to Australia, it gets held by Customs, I pay import duties, and it still ends up being much cheaper than buying it from an Australian importer (import duties will be 10% of the purchase price, give or take, but Australian markup for pre-imported laptops over US sale price is closer to 100%).

So why a post at all then? It wasn't a lazy-web request, it was just a complaint. There's a cheap method of buying a laptop, in which I shop on US websites after finding one that will take a non-US billing address, bother my friends, spend a lot of time researching the minutiae of warranties (I'm at a loss, for example, for how I check Russell's claim that ThinkPads have international warranties unless I already own one), spend a bunch more time on Customs paperwork with which I'm utterly unfamiliar and then receive it. There's an easy method of buying a laptop, in which I walk into an Australian store, give them money and receive a laptop. One takes many hours of my time, one involves twice as much money. And thus a whiny blog post was born.

A lot of the time when I hear about new social software I wrinkle my nose. Take this post hoping that people will take up Dopplr, which is apparently a site where you enter your travel details and it tells you if you're going to be in the vicinity of friends while travelling. Why did I wrinkle my nose? Because the beneficiaries of this kind of site are people who travel a hell of a lot. The rest of us are just being harangued into entered our very occasional trips in order to provide the pool of people that our well-travelled friends might or might not hang out with. The chances of me personally finding someone to hang out with when travelling are much higher if I just post an itinerary to my blog and hope someone sends me an email saying huh, I'll be in town that weekend!. (Speaking of which, anyone I know going to be in Iaşi, Romania, between July 22 and August 6? Thought not. Let me know if you want a postcard though.)

Be that as it may, here's a social software idea that sounds useful: Crowdvine + Pathable, a combo which FOO Camp people used to hook up people with similar interests. Conferences should indeed do more of this stuff: you and him, you guys need to talk! There are meet ups and BOFs and such things of course, but it does sound like it's possible to develop the matching a lot if you can persuade people that it's worth their while to do up a decent profile.