Hear Ye! Since 1998.

Archived Posts for January 1998

Please note: The posts on this page are at least 3 years old. Links may be broken, information may be out of date, and the views expressed in the posts may no longer be held.
30
Jan 98
Fri

New Domain Names

Forgot to mention this. New top-level domain names are opening up (right now there’s .com, .net, .org, .gov .edu, .mil). Domains are relatively expensive, but the new domain names (.firm,.info,.nom,.rec,.shop,.web,.arts), combined with more domain name “retailers”, means the price to register one will be around US $50 (about AU$75 right now with our shocking exchange rate) for two years, with response times (to get the domain registered) coming down to minutes, as opposed to weeks. That’s global microeconomic reform for ya :).

I’ve also seen the site “http://come.to“. The domain is Tongan, but Tonga has been selling off domain names to aid its domestic economy :). Profitable, because “to” has obvious domain name benefits, as can be seen by come.to. Also was travel.to and something else I can’t remember

The Intel Deschute

I was looking for what processor speeds there will be by the year’s end. Just read from Tom’s Hardware Page, Intel plans the release of 450MHz chips in the 2nd half of this year. These chips are code named Deshute, and they’re just faster Pentium II chips. In addition, these chips will run off 100Mhz buses, and will take either Slot 1 or Slot 2 slots in the motherboard (440BX and 440NX motherboards respectively). Slot 2 chips are meant to be better cos they break the half a gig of ram barrier or something, but how many home owners use that much ram? They will be running off a different type of Level 2 cache too, which gives a 10% speed advantage over the Slot 1s of the same clock speed (I think). I’m not sure about anything> I just said (I probably mixed the figures up), but I definitely know is that 450Mhz is fast. Mmm speeeed.

StarCraft … but no Kali?

I got sent mail today from ASTRO. He’s put a post on the battle.net forum boards about how bad it would be if Blizzard tries to block out Kali support (possible by bloating the IPX packets or something, as the Internet is slower than a LAN). View his post, and my post :).

Madonna/Ugly Phil Interview

Yeh I’m still awake. 2-day fm’s got this interview coming up next Monday with Madonna. What a bitch. I won’t be waiting for this interview, but they’ve been ragging on about it for a week now. Huh.

29
Jan 98
Thu

Second Day Back – More school stuff

Well it was too good to last. No homework yesterday, but I get hit with a load o’ work today. One economics multiple choice assessment next week, two maths assessments in a fortnight, and a physics one sometime. There’ll probably by time gaps in this journal cos I’m busy. So what am I doing this weekend? 720+ multiple choice questions. Uggh.

Hah – the Educating Rita excursion permission note was handed out today. Late March is the date.

Bloody hell. Canteen prices rose again. Australia’s underlying inflation rate is 1.4% (Dec 96 – Dec 97), but prices rose 10-15%. $2 stuff rose to $2.30.

Ultima Online

Got told by several people that Ultima Online’s out in Australia. I’m still not getting it until/if an Aussie server gets online. Haha, heard from my friend that the player char (PC) population was way too high, and the result was “lynch mobs” of 20+ people wading into dungeons waiting at respawning points. Just imagine, snake sticks its head out from behind a rock and gets hit by four clubs, seven swords, two lightning bolts, five arrows and a fireball :).

Look at those odds…

In the SMH there was some Stay In Touch article about a woman dealing out cards to four people, and each person gets a full suite each. The odds are like 2,000,000,000,000 to 1 or something. Absolutely amazing.

28
Jan 98
Wed

First Day Back At School

Sheesh. Nothing has changed. Not much anyway. The new marsh is … well … not as charismatic as Marshall Sweeney. I guess we just gotta get to know him better. He kept saying “Keep Quiet! How many times do we have to tell you!”. The thing is it is the first day back, assembly hadn’t even started, and no one had already told us to keep quiet. It’s alright to tell us to shut up, but he kept adding “how many times…”.

The school switched over to IBMs!! They finally saw the light! Woohoo! 26 P-166 MMXs! At least I can see where some of our fees are going. Hmmm – maybe after I finish School (ie, the end of this year) I can sorta hire the room for a day or two, get a few people along, install some games and have a massive lan gaming day. Probably won’t happen. The school won’t want games on the machines, will they, even though we’d delete them afterwards. Besides, the lan runs on NT and NT doesn’t support some games :(.

The car park development was halted over the holidays. Too hot for the workers to work or something. Some union thing. Since the computing department moved to the maths department, the maths department moved to a row of prefab classrooms stuck on top of the underground carparks. At least they have air-conditioning. The thing is that they are all so close together.
Our 4-unit class easily makes the most noise.  We have a habit of breaking into “clapping frenzies” – especially when someone enters the room. What happens is someone starts clapping and soon the class (only 14 of us though) starts full-on yelling, cheering and clapping (much to the confusion of the guy who walks in, and when we stop, the moment the person opens his mouth to say something, we start clapping again). Click here to listen to a relatively small frenzy. Today? 4 clapping sprees, and many laughing epidemics prompted the room across the corridor to stare at us. A whole host of bewildered (and annoyed?) faces looking at us pissing ourselves with laughter.

One person noticed my new glasses. Only one. Incredible. Well I guess they do look similar. So how did I lose my old ones? Well for the hols I was up at the Gold Coast with a few friends. One of the theme parks we went to was Wet ‘n’ Wild – the water park full of slides n all that. Anyway, I normally take my glasses off for rides (even though I’m pretty much lost without em). However they got this new ride called Calypso Beach. What it is is this sort of circular moat of water. The water has a current powerful enough to drag a tube (which you plunk your butt into) around and around. Some sort of relaxation ride. So I think, “tame”, right? I would like to see where I’m going for once, so I decide that I’ll wear my glasses. Anyway my friend, Kevin, decides to have a race. There’s this bridge and we race over one lap. He beats me, but I want a rematch. He agrees but this time its over two laps. Calypso is damn crowded, so we have to weave our way through all the people in tubes. I lead, but Kev catches up with me. Now there’s this little offshoot which runs off into an artificial beach. See the diagram. The yellow bit’s the beach, the blue arrow is the current direction and the back lines are walls. When he catches up with me, I give him a shove into the beach junction, and he gets stuck. So he gets out of the tube and tries to push it back into the main river, but there are so many people trying to get into the beach that he gives up. He was wearing sunnies, and that, combined with the look of frustration on his face reminded me of one of those bad guys in Bond movies where they get outsmarted by Bond again (no – I’m not comparing myself to Bond, but it was a brilliant tactical move :). Its this face staring at me amongst a sea of laughing faces. Hahaha. Once he makes it out of the beach area, I’m miles ahead. He jumps out of the tube again (which was not allowed for the race) and starts moving towards me. Looked like he was going to try to tip my tube over in revenge. So I sort of panic, and try to jump out of the tube. Crap did I look like an unco. I flipped straight over, face first into the water. My first worry was that everyone’d be looking at me (“Hey look at that dumb Asian kid” :), but that wasn’t the case. The second worry was that I felt my glasses come off while under the water. They floated straight off my face and bang. The current took them. Wet ‘n’ Wild wasn’t much of a help, they said, “maybe tomorrow, our cleaner should pick them up and we’ll call you”. But they never did (yes, we gave them the phone number). So 5,000 people have trampled over my glasses in the meantime. Sooner or later the lenses will crack, someone will step on them, cut their foot, sue the crap out of WnW and I won’t get a cent :P.

Clinton the Gigolo ;)

Ahaha is he getting the crap bagged out of him now. Even in Christian Studies (okay, PTC to be exact) he makes a guest appearance :). We’re talking about what the difference is between knowing someone, and knowing about someone. The chaplain begins explaining (not a direct quote but something like this) : “yeah – knowing someone is more personal than just having heard about them, which is just knowing about someone. Take the President for example … err … maybe that’s not so good an example.” Haha. Yes we know the President. Personally. They also bagged him out on 2-day fm. Funny stuff. Just switch on and you’ll hear something about Clinton.

Well I know that he’s not been found lying yet, but I don’t believe him and I don’t believe how they say “he’s the President so what he says must be true”. Hey – this comes from the guy who said, “I smoked marijuana but did not inhale”. The same person is splitting hairs over the difference between oral and “normal” sex – look are we interested in the difference? They are both forms of being unfaithful. I mean, do we want kids hearing the most powerful man in the world talking about different forms of sex? Sheesh. Ah get rid of the guy.

Links

You bored? Here are some sites that’ll keep you interested if you like this
sorta stuff — which I do.
http://www.UrbanLegends.com/
Pretty self-explanatory
http://www.officialdarwinawards.com/
– "Following the ideas of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards are given, usually
posthumously, to the individual(s) who remove themselves from the gene pool in the most
spectacular fashion. However there is an exception to the requirement to die. If said
individual does not die, however does render him/her self incapable of producing any
children – they may be eligible for the dubious honor of receiving the award while still
alive."  A cack. Be sure to read about the guy that
had a dye bomb (that explodes at 400°C) explode in his pants …

This morning, early morning…

Couldn’t get to sleep so I decided to read on of the English text. Educating Rita (I think drama is in italics) looked pretty thin, so I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. Took 1 1/2 hours. Finished it about 1.40am. And whaddaya know – it’s the next text we’re doing in class :) In fact, we have to bring it in tomorrow and some time in Feb we’re gonna watch a live production of it. Which reminds me – I gotta make sure that the Dawe poetry assessment due tomorrow is in my bag.

First Journal Entry Ever

Why I wrote this journal will be made clear when I have the chance to write the appropriate page on it. I’ll stick all this in a journal directory, and also a link from an aboutme directory.



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