(0)There are times, thankfully very occasionally, when I wish the human body did not need to eat, sleep or visit the toilet. This week is one of them…
The new Powerbooks have an accelerometre inside. It detects if a Powerbook is falling and parks the hard drive heads to lessen the chance of a hard drive crash. The accelerometre can be tapped into for other purposes and people have been throwing up ideas about making it into a user interface input. It’s a snazzy idea, but are you really going to want to pick up your 2kg, $3000+ laptop and give it a shake around just to do some “rapid e-mail filing” which could be accomplished by hitting keyboard buttons instead? I also read that it could have applications in other devices, such as mobiles: “nod” the phone and down for “OK”, shake from side to side for “cancel”. But same problem, moving the thumb to hit a button is a lot easier than moving your whole forearm. (Similar reason to why people use speed dial instead of voice dialing.)
Still, there is some novelty value to being able to use your laptop as an expensive spirit level.
Bloody addictive game. I’m playing two main characters: Apek on Shadowsong, Taedar on Blackhand. I’ve you’ve got a character in either of those realms, drop me a line.
Rockstar Games is releasing a new Grand Theft Auto game. (Ok, so it may be in bad taste, but it’s nonetheless amusing.)
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(0)Every Tuesday evening, a group of 6-10 of us gather for a few games of DoTA. The majority of us happen to be lawyers. At one point in the game last night, Jack turned around to the rest of the team and frantically asked:
“The left corridor is getting raped! Does anyone have capacity?“
We stopped playing and just stared at him for a few seconds. (For the non-lawyers, “Do you have capacity?” is the much maligned phrasing used when lawyers stick their heads into your office and want to give you work…)
1. At Star City, you can sign up for a free membership card. This card entitles you to three free drinks per day. However, if you swipe the card through the drinks machine correctly, you can get an unlimited supply. There are two lights that go on when a drink is being dispensed, one is the circular light surrounding the button of the drink you selected. The second is the arrow that’s above the hole where the drink comes out. First, order a drink. Next, the trick is to swipe your card just after the circular light goes out, but before the arrow light turns off. Don’t swipe too fast, or the machine won’t read your card. This will get you a second drink without increasing your daily drink count. Repeat for subsequent drinks.
2. If you have a 3 mobile phone, and have free 3-to-3 calls and voicemail, instead of dialing your voicemail, call your own number instead. You will automatically get diverted to your own voicemail, but because 3 thinks you’re calling a regular 3 phone number, you’ll be able to check your voicemail for free. I don’t have 3, so I can’t verify this, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
3. Are you a UNSW student? The Factiva database on Sirius has a complete full-text archive of newspapers (AFR, SMH, Australian, etc) and periodicals (BRW, The Economist, etc). Through Factiva, you can view articles that you’d otherwise have to pay for, such as those marked as “Premium” on certain websites, or articles in the pay-per-access archive of the SMH.
1000 pages photocopied, 1 toner shortage, 1 paper jam, 28 staples for $3. And so began my final semester at uni.
Finally finished the memorials today at 4.30am. Woke up at 8.00am to get into uni to print off the copies needed. There were lots of first year law students wandering around trying to figure out why the library lifts only go up to level 7 even though there are buttons all the way up to 14. Found out that the law school doesn’t have any staplers that can go through 45 page documents, so we had to take everything down to the printery. The printery was insanely busy, so they stuck us on the job queue and we had to reschedule the courier pick up time to late afternoon. By the time I got into IP, I was feeling pretty out of it. Falling asleep in the front row in the first class of the year is not a good way to start a subject with a 20% class participation component.
Anyway the memorials are all in now, and strangely enough, it feels like I’m on holidays now. It’s been a busy summer, but it’s time to enjoy the last semester, which is looking pretty interesting:
(3)We’ve just been informed all teams have an extension on submitting moot memorials until next Monday. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
Been spending around 15 hours a day over the last week on the moot memorials. Slowly going crazy. But anyway, here are some snapshots of the heavy rains that came through over the weekend. My street turned into a river.
The last one was taken some time after the rain stopped when I was playing around with the camera. There’s still a fair amount of water on the road since you can see the car’s reflection on it.
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(0)| 143 days spent in current location | |
| Previously | Copenhagen, Denmark |
| » Currently | San Francisco, CA (31/12/25 5:29am) |
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2:30pm (GMT +11.00) tomorrow 
