Hear Ye! Since 1998.

Archived Posts for October 1999

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 Links may be broken, information may be out of date, and the views expressed in the posts may no longer be held.
29
Oct 99
Fri

UIX Demo Download

3DFiles has an “unofficial” copy of the Ascension Demo at this FTP site. It’s not 400 megs, it’s 300 :).

Humour

This might keep you entertained for a little while. I just wrote up a new, updated humour page (yes that’s humour with a “u”, it’s no typo).

28
Oct 99
Thu

Star Trek DS9: The Begotten (Ep 5.12)

A fairly significant episode. Kira has the O’Brien’s baby. Odo gets his shapeshifting abilities back. The Odo/Mora plot was an interesting one, especially in light of the conversation Sisko and Odo had a few weeks back regarding children, and Sisko tells him, “you don’t know what you’re missing.” This episode, we find out. Quark in typical fashion sells a pile of goop to Odo – a pile of goop which turns out to be a baby changling – and Odo is enthralled and undertakes a parental role, trying to nurture this baby changeling. Mora, watches on. This can be pretty much viewed as a grandfather-father-son relationship. Sort of how strict parenting and punishment is justified because it is for the child’s own good. Of course, no child sees the good in being whacked with a stick (or being zapped with electric charges in this case). So, Odo effectively leaves home, and when he finally gets a “child” of his own, he is determined not to bring up his child the way Mora brought up him. Odo, despite good intentions, fails. The goop stubbornly remains a pile of goop, and eventually, Odo turns to Mora for advice. An intelligent plot with an underlying issue about parenting (“you’ll understand when you’re a parent one day” – familiar, yes?). You can’t but wonder, however, if it really is the founders who are behind Odo regaining his abilities… A test? If he shunned the thing, he would never have got his powers back. And where did Quark find the changeling? The sub-story was one that had to happen. Quite amusing. I wonder if surrogate mothers experience the same feelings that Kira did?

Win 2000

Just got RC2… apparently it has SB Live and Monster Sound MX300 support, so I just might reinstall it and keep it installed… [More drivers]

Pay TV

There’s a satellite dish now sitting on the roof. Hey we got World Movies as well :). Unfortunately Dad’s hogging the TV now :/

ASCII Art

Asheron.org is a site on ASCII, ANSI and RIP art (remember those BBSes?)

In Column 8

This in column 8 today… geez… no wonder why you Yanks and Canadians get the wrong impression. Remind me to go feed my pet kangaroo in the backyard later on…

VISITING Canada, Julian Faigin, of Sydney, found in a Toronto newspaper an ad for “Kiwi Shampoo – Venture Down Under”. “What does it all mean?” asks Julian. “I guess NZ is ‘down under’, too: After a long day of wrestling crocs, chasing Kangas and slinging back the coldies by the billabong, you need an escape … Whether you’re a Bruce or a Sheila, our natural fruit extracts will help revitalize, strengthen, condition, and restore moisture to your hair. And if the sun and blowdrying are leaving your hair like burnt shrimp on the barbie, our added heat and UV protectors will provide extra protection on those days in the Great Outback.“What do Canadians think of us?

Communal Crier

Haven’t forgotten about the revised geographical survey… just been doing other stuff. I just something juicy coming up too…

• De/nnis

Y’know what? Techno Weenie has a sweet 404 page

Have you checked out the Atroxi radio show? Just did… it’s not bad at all. Leave it in the background and enjoy. Talking coherently and fairly interestingly for 2 hours into a microphone isn’t easy, so I guess Jeff working at a radio station does help. With regards to the failed realtime real audio streaming, what you could do is use a ShoutCast server instead. What you do is get someone with a cable modem to set up a ShoutCast server on their computer. You get your computer with its 56K modem uploading the upstream to the cabled computer (using Winamp and the appropriate Shoutcast plugin), and people connect to it using WinAmp and so the cabled computer is dishing out multiple downstreams, so as long as the upload stream is < 56kpbs, people listening in should be fine (unless the cable modem runs out of upload bandwidth).

And Paul let me know that Slime Volleyball is dead. Noooo…. Now I gotta find a new link.

Joke Time

Why does this remind me of a certain someone in this little community? :)

A high school English teacher reminds her class of tomorrow’s final exam. She tells the class there would be no excuse for not showing up, except for serious injury or illness, or a death in the student’s immediate family. A smart-ass jock in the back of the room asks, “What about extreme sexual exhaustion?” The entire class does its best to stifle their laughter and snickering. When silence is restored, the teacher smiles sympathetically at the student, and sweetly says:

“That excuse would not be acceptable. You can still write with your other hand.”

MP3 Organiser

Looking for a powerful program to catalog your MP3 collection? Try Shuffleplay. It has a feature called a “recursive search” that will find all your mp3s on your computer, on all harddrives. It also will do a batch renaming of files and ID3 tags. Very nice. And there’s always this place, if you want to crack it.

Formula 1 Rejects

Very amusing site dished up by my friend Jamie. Find out about people like Perry McCarthy whose F1 career lasted all of 18 metres.

Welcome to the ‘Formula One Rejects’ web site – a tribute to those Formula One drivers who didn’t make it. Sure – you’ve all heard of Michael Schumacher, Ayrton Senna, Nelson Piquet, Alain Prost and co – but have you heard of Eric van de Poele, Andrea Chiesa, Fabrizio Barbazza or Perry McCarthy?

Ultima IX: Ascension Demo

Origin has done it once again. Remember how Wing Commander II weighed in at a whopping 20 megs and came on about 15 floppies? Fast forward to the end of the millennium, and now they are distributing a 400 meg demo. If the Ultima Ascension demo is 400 megs… I wonder how big the full thing is. Damn… not available for download, or at least, I haven’t found out if anyone’s stuck it on the net. This game is gonna kick major ass… I still remember playing Ultima I on the old Apple IIC. It’s come a long way.

Demo News! Subscribers of CGW should be receiving their December issue now, which contains the Ultima IX: Ascension demo. If you’re not a subscriber, look for the December issue to appear on the shelves within the coming weeks!! Subscribers of CGW should be receiving their December issue now, which contains the Ultima IX: Ascension demo. If you’re not a subscriber, look for the December issue to appear on the shelves within the coming weeks!

26
Oct 99
Tue

Star Trek DS9: The Darkness and The Light (Ep 5.11)

This was a weird episode… I don’t know how to write about it. The stuff about light and darkness, and morality and civilians in war was handled in a way I failed to grasp – especially with the light/dark metaphor which lost me. We do find out that the station security sucks major ass. A pregnant woman beating up three male security guards? The ability to blow up half the station with a hunter probe?

All Done!

Finally got that compiler mofo outta the way! Now I can get back to updating…

% give cs1021 compiler Compiler.java Compiler??.java
Submission: compiler
——————————
Files found: Compiler.java Compiler00.java Compiler01.java Compiler02.java Compiler03.java Compiler04.java Compiler05.java Compiler06.java Compiler07.java Compiler08.java Compiler09.java Compiler10.java Compiler11.java Compiler12.java Compiler13.java
——————————

Running submission through simple test…
Compiling your program …
Submission compiled succesfully
Testing your compiler on /home/cs1021/public_html/simpleJava/examples/0/Simple0b.java
The output from the simpleRISC program it produced is:

42

Your submission produced a correct SimpleRISC program.

Submission datestamp: Tue Oct 26 21:56:48 1999
Assignment deadline: Tue Oct 26 23:59:00 1999
This submission is on time.
Submission accepted
%

And here’s some quasi-assembler the program generates to crack your head on (heh – gibberish to those who’ve never dealt with assembler before). This is actually a Stack Quicksort program.

  11:55pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Communal Crier

E/N Day yesterday.

Moved
• Paranoia
• Wordpage

  11:55pm (GMT +10.00)  •  E/N  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 
24
Oct 99
Sun

Alive and Insane

Sorry, been really slack lately. I’ve spent the whole weekend on the last assignment I have to do for this year – the writing of a Java Compiler… in Java. Got through most of it except I’m stuck on parsing complex (multi operator) expressions. And I’m still stuck after thinking about it all weekend. Anyway, I will chip in a small update for today.

Schmick MP3s

Booya! has been pimping some schmick MP3s lately.

Free Information

If the site above isn’t a joke, this one certainly is.

Free Food

No, not for you. I don’t know if this site is for real or not, but it seems bona-fide. Apparently if you click through a link on The Hunger Site, sponsor companies will buy food for people in third world countries for a maximum of one click per day per person.

18
Oct 99
Mon

Communal Crier

New.

• FUBAR
• Phester
• Longview

MP3 sites

Courtesy of Lonestar, which is further courtesy of Bence. Hear Ye! has no compunctions about linking mp3 sites ever since the swede teenager was acquitted :). Link here.

Online Storage

Most of these sites offer 25 megs of online storage: iDrive, Free Disk Space, Free Drive, X:Drive.

Familiar?

Foxtrot Comic (hehe keeping in mind the current hub-bub about macs).

Canned E-Mail Demands Canned Replies

Y’know those stupid e-mail messages that get forwarded a million times? And the stupid messages that come with them? Here’s a page with prewritten responses to them. Interesting.

16
Oct 99
Sat

Star Trek: Rapture (Ep 5.10)

I just realised I forgot to do a gobbet on this week’s episode. Well, you don’t get off so easy – here it is. Most reviewers found this a highly refined and impressive episode of Trek, generally one of the season’s best. I, on the other hand could not share the high level of appreciation they displayed. The episode is based upon Sisko (Starfleet officer and Bajoran religious figure) being zapped by a faulty wiring and henceforth being gifted with rapturous visions which have the unfortunate side effect of gradually killing him. The visions must be rapturous, for Sisko is willing to die for them. This episode was filled (intentionally) with character about-turns and contradictions.

The episode was one regarding strength of faith – how it is everything to those who have it, and to those who do not have it, cannot understand it (and that statement it from a previous Trek episode). What was intriguing was that Sisko, a strong father figure and one who accepted the role of the emissary reluctantly, was not himself this episode. Understandably, Sisko may grow into the role of the emissary, but to neglect so much for visions? To have a smirk on his face while confronted by his son who is close to tears at the thought of losing his father? You could almost apply the term “spoilt child” to Sisko in this episode. Then there’s Kai Winn’s 180 degree change in viewing Sisko. However, she has been so embroiled in politics that I associate her not with the Bajoran religion, but politico-spirituality. It is hard to trust her, even though her retorting statements to Kira were very well said. Does she know something regarding Sisko’s visions we don’t? Am I missing the point completely?

Another aspect that was offputting was how Trek is so scientific. Not necesarily saying science will explain everything, or that science is everything, but even episodes that are based around faith and religion are normally weighted with science as the flipside. This episode has no science to it. Something I was not used to. On closer inspection, could this parallel the conversion of atheists to having a religion? I guess the Trek writers were handing us this episode, and were trusting the viewer to accept things as they were, with faith, as it were.

Sixth Sense

This was an interesting “horror” movie. To be more precise, it wasn’t a horror movie. It was a movie with horror/suspense elements. I was told that you understand it all after the movie. So there I am, watching, and until the last half hour, am happy I understand the majority of what’s going on. Then, there’s a particularly imaginative plot development that caught everyone by surprise. After the movie, conversation for it ensued. And it wasn’t just of the, “What’d you think?” “Oh, I thought it was good.” “Yeah me too. Let’s go eat.” variety either. I managed to tie up most of the weird stuff, except for a few things. Perhaps someone can explain these to me (Highlight. Don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t seen it):

• At the beginning, the mum walks back into the kitchen and all the drawers are open. I thought the kid had telekinetic powers, but that wasn’t the case. When Cole leaves, his hand leaves a condensation handprint. Does this mean the room was cold (signifying a ghost)?
• Cole gets injured by scratches. Where are they from?

Here’s what someone wrote on IMDB about it:

After hearing my friends talk about this film I knew I had to see it, and I did, but I wanted to see it by myself. This was not a good idea since I was the only one in the theatre which seated about 500 people. This movie terrified me, I had to get up and move to the back row so I knew nothing was behind me…. All in all a very good film, I just wish I could go back in my basement.

You’d have to pay me quite a bit to do that…

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Stupid IS Department

The school of information systems wrote something laughable (see underlined part):

Overestimate in length of attribute
Some students provided CustomerID of length 15 with a numeric format (e.g., Length: 9(15), Format: 999999999999999 and Range of Choices as: 000000000000001 – 999999999999999). This is clearly inappropriate since the table of data would have at the most more than 999 Billion people (999,999,999,999,999). This quantity includes all Australians, and nearly the whole planet’s population. A realistic size might be as in the Customer Hobby table above where a maximum number of customers would be 999,999. If our customer list exceeded 1 Million, then Finda Pet would need to start removing customers who were no longer active (such as deceased customers, etc).

Not quite nearly.

Pay TV

Finally… we get Foxtel on the 28th. Of course, Camden (whoop whoop) doesn’t have any cable laid within 30 ks (which also means no cable modem, even if Telstra’s pricing wasn’t so exorbitant). So we have to get it in by satellite.

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Font FAQ

You’ll find a few interesting things about fontography in this comp.fonts newsgroup FAQ.

Reverse Psychology

Scene: The boardroom of Pez Candy, Inc. The marketing manager is giving a report. “In conjunction with our legal department, out latest ‘marketing move’ had driven the average hit rate for the word ‘pez’ on Internet search engines from 14 last month to roughly 2.2 million. Suckers.”

Really, though. They say you can’t use the word pez, and the next thing everyone is doing is writing “pez pez pez pez” on their page. Get the masses to do the subliminal advertising… As a sidenote, subliminal advertising, in the form of messages that flash too fast for the conscious mind to comprehend, is illegal.

Cyber Swiss Army Knife

No it’s not a “virtual knife”, but it is a knife for the wired world. Toolwise, I can see myself using one of these things more than a normal one. See Victorinox.

14
Oct 99
Thu

Rugby – AUS v USA

As expected… 55-19 walk-all-over-yo-ass scoreline. :)

Ack

The database has dodgy stamped all over it, but I’m entirely apathetic right now. Funny… about 15 friends, all with the same assignment due, online all the way through to 2am, then dropped off to 10 at 3am… Now there’s 4 of us and we’re not sleeping anytime soon.

Possessed Computer 2

Chatting to Noddy, and he sent me to this link which is vaguely related to my possessed box – pretty interesting trivia-type stuff. It’s about broadcasting radio signals using the CPU. This seems to have originated from this Slashdot thread. Also from him,

You can also produce different pitched sounds by moving the head of a floppy drive at different speeds. There was a virus for ( it’s name was Gaddafi ) for AmigaOS that would occasionaly play “El Condor Pasa” with the internal 3,5″ floppy ! The coolest virus ever :-)

there your virus idea

Heh thanks for that link. That served to freak me out a little more. The database is still being worked on…

Rugby World Cup

It’s early Friday morning and in a matter of hours Australia will be kicking Yankee ass :). Stay tuned… results page here.

Buses

Little anecdote comes to mind… sitting on the bus on the back seat a couple days ago. Chatting to a friend when I turn my head… there’s this seedy looking guy in the corner drawing these nude pics in a dishevelled scrapbook (I think it was a diary, actually). Bad thing was, he couldn’t draw and the chicks that came out were… <shudder> let’s just say I didn’t make too many glances at his (I’m sure he’d call it) “art”.

Reminds me of Solosier, the 40 year old, and a rather unfortunate typo :)

of course, this chick is like 40, and i would touch her with a 10 ft pole, and she can hardly speak english (yes, i met her), but that is NOT the point, damn it.

… Or was it a typo?

Life

Two assignments, both last minute jobs. Some accounting essay analysing Southcorp and a BDM (business data management – a full of shit information systems subject) database to do in MS Access. The spec for the BDM isn’t. As in, the specific-ation isn’t specific. It’s the single most ambiguous document (username: INFS1603, password: BDM – both case sensitive) I’ve seen this year. It’s due tomorrow, it’s not finished, and I’m updating this page. Looks like another all-nighter. The State Transit Authority almost decided to pull another fucking strike which would have made things particularly tough for me, since I need the bus to get to uni, and I need to get to uni to hand the dbase in… got an offer for a lift in, but that would involve me getting up at some unholy hour to get to Central on time. But they aren’t striking anymore, thankfully.

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Possessed Computer

I was working away on an assignment last night when my other computer started blurting stuff from the speakers. Strange. There weren’t any applications open. I turned the volume up and I’m hearing radio chatter… and not only that, but police radio chatter. So I shut everything down (the computer is networked to my main computer and accesses the net via proxy) including the stuff in the system tray. Radio chatter continues. I give the three finger salute. The task list reveals a crashed-while-closing Netscape. So I force that to quit. Still chatter. And it wasn’t a file, because it wasn’t looping and it had been going for quite a while. I shut down the proxy server on the main computer, so the other computer wasn’t connected to the Net anymore. Nothing. Then I shut down each task listed app in the Cont-Alt-Del menu one by one. No good. I pulled out Wintop (process viewer, like WinNT’s task manager and Linux’s ‘top’ command) and began shutting down non-system tasks. In there end there wasn’t anything running on the system, and still I was getting noise from cop cars and radios. Freaky shit. I rebooted and it didn’t happen again. I still am totally bewildered… if it was a virus, it’s a weird one… that’s the only possibility I can think of, and not a very possible one at that.

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APC Pocketbooks

Legendary stuff… APC Mag have a series of “pocketbooks” on different topics. They have a kickass one on Linux which is a fairly comprehensive newbie guide and they just released a revised edition with RH6 on it (even though 6.1 is out). They’ve also got one on networking which is surprisingly informative and caters for all common platforms (PC, Mac, Linux). Link.

C-U, C-Me… F-U, F-Me…

Thanks to Miyagi for this, even though it’s on Fuzzy/SD. Something for Bence, perhaps? :) The newest wave in interactivity… What next… P-U, P-Me? The latest in cyber-water-sports? Ugh.

Also from Miyagi is a little EQ humour.

Linux According to Microsoft

Microsoft is on the war path with Linux, and here’s some article attempting to trash Linux: Linux Myths. Some truths, some inaccuracies, as always. Which is which is pretty much up to personal opinion in many cases, though.

10
Oct 99
Sun

Communal Crier – Etymology Edition

Just what the fuck is going on with the term “e/n”? The term has met constant criticism ever since it was conceived. Schyler has e/n listed under “e/n weblogs” (huh?) and Roosh has come up with some, if I may be frank, G/S bullshit terminology. Many seem to be ashamed of the label. Why? Well I doubt it’s those three characters – it’s more likely the type of sites and people that are associated with e/n. There’s a weird stigma attached to this “community”, and merely changing the label affixed to it won’t do much good. Tomarto? Tomayto? So what is e/n? Screw it… e/n sites are basically online journals, but so are weblogs and online diaries. E/N is a community, and a self-proclaimed e/n site is one that thinks it belongs to it. Although I don’t know if it’s coherent enough to be called that… it’s more like a commercial industry, or a rowdy neighborhood. This may be a cop out definition, but I can’t think of a better one (and yes I know I defined it as something differently a few months ago). Dare you to.

• Gods Journal – “I Am That I Am” Decidedly blasphemous, heretical and guaranteed to be offensive to the Catholics. Had this been written a few centuries back, Mr yah_yah_yahweh@hotmail.com (“What does God need with an e-mail address?“) would’ve been burnt at the stake. But this is the net generation, and thankfully just about anything goes. Worth a browse, some things I found quite amusing :).

Are you a man or a woman?
Make no mistake about it. I am 100% pure male. Well…except when–but, no, we won’t go there.

But it’s not e/n.

I know that you’re like the pimp grandmaster daddy [damn straight! :)] of keeping up with the E/N stuff, so you’ll be happy to hear that it’s not specifically E/N.

• Absurdities Observed – Moved with a brand spanking new layout.

Oh, and BAMF has a kickass article. That, is e/n.

8
Oct 99
Fri

Virus Database

Alphabetically sorted, and with screenshots.

IO & Galileo

Nasa opened up a site tracking the Galileo probe’s flybys of IO, Jupiter’s active volcanoes moon.

Communal Crier

FallenAngel from The Abode is holding a “secrets” contest. What’s the most seedy secret you’ve ever withheld from someone? :)

Laser Surgery

Time has a front page story on laser-corrective surgery for the eye. Sounds a lot like a lottery. 70% get near perfect vision, but that’s 3 people in 10 which don’t. Psychologically, 30% feels very threatening. But medical procedures get better in time, and in a decade, it’s reckoned the sucess rate will move to 90%. It’s a gamble, either way, and the stakes are pretty damn high (your lifetime’s eyesight and the $5000 it takes to get the surgery done… quite steep for a 15 minute procedure).

Things that go “bump” in the night

Cheers to Bump for his maturity! (And of course, for pointing out my quasi-hypocrisy, which in light of the March post, is – but as I said I relentlessly bag out macs for the hell of it. Call it blind dogma :) Bump has actually been around for two months longer than this site, so that’s a testimony to its longevity. Actually the only glaring physical difference between logs and e/ns, is that for e/ns, each post is individually titled. There are “cultural” (if you can call it that) and other more subtle differences, though.

Star Trek DS9: The Ascent (Ep 5.9)

An passable episode that sort of became farcical at the end (especially the Nog/Jake thing – that was very soapie-ish). The ‘relationship’ between Odo and Quark is a weird one… they hate each other, but it’s not a cold hatred. If it’s meant to be, it’s not portrayed very well. It’s sort of like a “hate to love” (as opposed to “love to hate”) thing. Nice mountain scenery though.

Communal Crier

• Mute 300 – Quite a decent design, and a shitload of first day posts :)
• RTS-Addicts – Vaccine is on the move again.

  6:00pm (GMT +10.00)  •  E/N  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Some Trivia

Well if it wasn’t a sign of the times last night… BITSA held a trivia night last night and we were a table of 7. It didn’t take us long to realise how yuppie we looked with 5 mobiles laid out on the table (these days, the average uni student is a yuppie). Anyway there were about 10 rounds of 10 questions each (mixed in with some bonus rounds like some ridiculous scavenger hunt where you had to dig up a piece of underwear without taking any clothes off – ie, have one in your bag or something). Round 2 came along…

“What does the medical term epistaxis refer to?”
“WTF? We’re not med students… we’re IT students!”
“Hey, Dad’s a doctor… maybe I should call him…” (fiddling with phone idly)
“Yeah! Good idea! Do it!”
“Are you serious???”
“Yeah!”

(moments later)

“Guys, guys… got it… epywhatever is a nose bleed.”

Of course once the first phone call was made, that was just the beginning. We were all pulling out phones calling home for trivia answers :) Luckily the phone calls were all free coutesy of Optus ‘Yes’ time! I think in the end I had dad sitting next to his mobile with an atlas and dictionary beside him. Then we got some crazy ideas about getting someone with an Optus mobile down to the computer labs (with its chunky net connection) for quick Net searching hehe. Maybe next time :)

The final question of the night was a coincidence…

“Last question… finish off this verse by Wordsworth.”
[Big groan from everyone]
“I wandered lonely as a cloud / Tha–“
[Big excited gasp from me] “Shit! I know this! I know this!”
“–floats on high o’er vales and hills / When all I once I saw a crowd…”
[Still excited] “um… um… a host of golden daffodils!”
[From rest of table] “Shhhhhhhh.”

Year 11 I had to do some big ass project on the past 6 centuries of English verse (it was like 15,000 words) and the verbal component was the from-memory recitation of some poem from that era. And tada… that was the very poem I had chosen. But no, I didn’t trust my memory.

“Um dad, is the computer on? It is? Can you quickly go to the D drive… Documents folder… what do you mean there’s no documents folder? … Told you it was there… now Old docs, School work, Year 11… look for something with poetry recitation or Wordsworth. Found it? Cool! Read it out!”

Well it was pretty funny at the time – not sure whether it was cheating or not :) I guess last night was an exception to what’s displayed on my phone normally…

:)

My original idea :)

  6:00pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Send her victorious, happy and glorious…

Is this aging gracefully? They gave Liz a double chin this year. This is the back of the 20 cent coin.

If we turn republic, does her mugshot disappear?

6
Oct 99
Wed

she hates my futon

sonic ICQed me a link to a site called My Boot. On it is a novella entitled “she hates my futon“. I just blew a few hours reading it. It’s that sorta thing where you read it with the intention of giving it a skim through, but end up reading the whole thing (all twenty something chapters!).

4
Oct 99
Mon

Communal Crier

Newsworthy is sonic’s Tales From The Trenches.

(New)
• Break and Enter – Run by Kayama, of Starfuckers. Something catchy about the new site’s name…
• United Fellowship of Bullshitters – This is your bandwagon e/n site, unfortunately. No content right now, Xoom hosted, and well… yeah.

Uni starts again tomorrow. Damn.

Graphics Interchange Format: I Rest My Case

If “gin” is pronounced “jinn”, why shouldn’t “gif” be pronounced “jiff”? The Final Word.

Desktop Archive

A large database of user desktops from around the world. Something strangely intriguing about other peoples’ desktops.

Wheelies, Yes, But… Stoppies?

A stoppie appears to be a wheelie reversed. Then there’s the almost oxymoronic “rolling stoppie” which involves you attempting to travel as far as possible on the front wheel of your bike. Check out the how-tos and hot-not-tos of wheelies and stoppies at this Aussie’s page (photos included). Why am I thinking of the Darwin Awards?

Disclaimer: You absolutely must do them. They are unreal – an incredible buzz. They are completely safe and legal. Police especially appreciate them, as do old people, bus drivers and members of parliament. By reading these instructions, you undertake to implement or attempt to implement a wheelie upon every occasion an opportunity presents itself. eg. when departing traffic lights, uncontrolled intersections, school crossings, random breath test stations etc.

2
Oct 99
Sat

Geo Survey

Still getting submissions (thanks!) – will wait until I stop getting them before updating.

Physical Activity

My quadraceps are hurting. Damn I’m unfit… Paintball on Friday was absolutely awesome. Got hit in the head twice, numerous body hits, but didn’t get bruised at all :). No one could get close enough heh. Had this game in a field called “The Village”. One team defends a village (with a medic, who can only be killed with two head shots) and flag, another team has to get the flag, but can’t enter the village. 50 players on the field, 25 a side. Looked like Braveheart (or a Zergling rush if you’d prefer). Anyway I was on the defending side on the front line… uploaded a fair few bullets into the oncoming hoard before getting smacked in the head, but in a mere 19.5 seconds the game was over. The ref blew his whistle, everyone stopped, only to hear some guy jumping up and down yelling “Fuck it!”. I thought the game was stopped because of injury, but it turned out that some guy managed to get to the flag in record time. He went spread-eagle in celebration, only to get smacked right in the nipple by a paintball. It was bleeding afterwards. Not a pleasant sight.

Golfed yesterday. Only 9 holes. First time since the beginning of the year. Scored a 51, pretty shoddy.

Quote

This from Bump. A damn mac user. Hah!

My iBook arrived yesterday, but the video fizzled out after about an hour. Apple is shipping me a new one.

I do conceed, as I previously said though, that the AirPort is a really schmick idea, and a PC designed by Apple would be nice (albeit sounding decidedly heretical).

PC Week hack

So the Linux box was hacked first in PC Week’s Hacking test (HAH!) Here’s how it was done. If you know a bit of Linux and have a reasonable understanding of perl, you’ll be able to understand this. I learnt a bit of stuff – first truly understandable technical account of of hacking I’ve read.

Matrix 2

IGN tells of a (spoiler) movie scene of one of the action scenes from The Matrix 2.

Answering the question of what came first, the script or the effects, the W brothers are having Mannex work up some cool new super FX scene ideas before they write the script. That’s what we like about those boys, always thinking so we can just sit back and watch the movie.

Note I said spoiler, so don’t get all pissy at me if you don’t want it spoilt. Not a very big spoiler though.

Provinces?

The guys over at Shazbot are celebrating Australia Week. ?. Guys, we don’t have provinces, we have states, just like you. Provinces makes us sound small and insignificant, and we can’t have that can we (sorry Canada)? Yes, we’re a nation in denial.

I have to enrol myself onto the voting roll. Otherwise they’ll slap me with a $55 fine. Australia has compulsory voting, and we’ve got a referendum coming up, November 6th. The two questions are – do we want a republic, and do we want the preamble to be part of the constitution. My answer is yes, and I have no idea, respectively. I don’t even know what our constitution states, and I’m sure many Australians are as clueless as me.



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