I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
Not strictly my dog, but still… heh. He’s a geek. Heh.
Addendum: I know it’s a crap photo. I accidentally took it with the flash on (for some arbitary reason I’d been using it the night before and had forgotten to turn it back off like I normally have it), and the dog moved before I could take a good second photo. No, it wasn’t posed.
Far out. I didn’t realise how cheap these things were: Voice over IP has nothing on calling cards.
I just called Tori in HK for about 30 minutes and it’s like… ~1.5c/minute. That’s 45c, which is nearly as cheap as a local call from a payphone here in Australia. Sure, there’s the cost of a local call to connect to the calling card service — let’s say ~20c, but still… wow. The cheapest VoIP rates here for the same service are still like 5c/minute or thereabouts.
Good stuff!
Also good stuff is the reason I was calling (well, at least part of)… Tori was in the SMH for getting Band 6 in every unit (along with Louis Garrick and Angus Thompson from SACS)!
Today annoys me because the numbers released don’t mean anything. It’s just appetite-whetting statistics, making one more impatient for 9am tomorrow when the real results are released! Oh, yes, for anyone who cares to know, my marks were about what I’d expected. Advanced English was higher (I got band 6!! My presumptuousness in those two exams must have gone down well… as confidence or something. Whatever, it worked!), and ITF was lower (probably should have studied a bit for that!), and Modern and Business were… significantly higher than state average, but still pretty ‘middle-of-the-road’ IMO. Whatever. Oh and I got E4 for both Extension courses… would have liked a higher Ext2 mark, but whatever. Probably the (unpublished, unlikely to be published) reflection statement dragged it down, seeing as it was written… last-minute-ish. Or maybe that didn’t drag it down and they just didn’t like the story. Who knows. Whatever :P It’s over!
Aside: is this the second-last entry under “School” on this blog?
Woo. Popped into Jaycar yesterday evening to buy some tape for Sunday, and they had quad-screened Belden 75 Ohm coax in their offcuts/discount box! It’s priced as if it were 5M, but I think it’s probably closer to 7 or 8, and the quality is brilliant. Even with crappy non-crimp (screw on) connectors. I got home and kicked myself because there is a tool here that can probably crimp on the ends, but I didn’t remember at the time and just wanted something that worked! Heh.
We’re still probably a bit short on cables, but I’m hoping to use this from the MX-50 to the projector (control is gonna be just behind the screen, and it’s not a particularly long throw)… so I just need to get ONE MORE cable sorted for camera #2 and everything is good. Assuming we have enough cameras, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish, with several people fishing, so God-willing we’ll get something sorted in time there. If not, it’s going to be great quality playback with crap quality live vision! Ah well, we can but try!
Anyway, I’m about to disappear and pick up my new toy for the weekend… Hello Panasonic MX-50!
I just turned off everything having finished playing/editing for the night, and took a step back to realise how much of a mess I’d created. There’s some excess gear (i.e. not for carols) in that shot above, but I’m still going to end up transporting more stuff than you can see there. Sigh. Good fun, though.
I might throw a web version up later (not quite at the stage where I can stream stuff live just yet — give it a few months ;-)), because there are only two carols on the programme under APRA/CCLI (the rest are public-domain)… so I might just cut out those two songs and publish the rest. If I can be bothered, and have time to setup capture, and capture works okay. Haven’t exactly got a DVC-PRO deck lying around, so I’ll be capturing straight to a PC… the problem is the PC with capture gear I want to use for replay.
Incidentally, whilst walking the dog today, I stumbled upon about 10 computers that had been dumped on the side of the road (not as sus as it sounds… the footpath was raised from the road, so it looked like someone had just had some fun chucking them off the edge. Mostly old Pentiums and so on.) and wound up carrying two of them home (whilst trying to hold a dog) — my arms hurt. Why did I carry two of them home? I was curious as to what was in them and wasn’t carrying a screwdriver on my keyring, because one looked like an ATX case (it wasn’t, just a slightly slimmer-than-usual-AT-case) and the other had Composite, S-Video, and an ambiguously-named “CCD-IN” port (it’s a 9-pin DIN socket I think… can’t be bothered getting up to check!) on a card on the back.
The motherboards are pretty good for their vintage (ATX-supporting Socket 7, one with onboard hardware audio and graphics… no, it’s not a Dell or Gateway or any of that proprietry crap.), but it still wasn’t worth carrying them. And there’s no way I can be bothered carrying them back now!
Anyway this card with S-Video and Composite sockets on it is actually an old-ish capture card, which might work with V4L and almost certainly doesn’t work with post-Windows ’98/NT4.0 Microsoft systems. Chances are it’d be crap quality capture anyway, and I’m unlikely to have time to setup/even try to setup it in any semi-working fashion before Sunday afternoon!
(Aside: I really need to buy an el-cheapo $60 TV-tuner for another computer at some point.)
Okay, I’m off to bed. Got to wake up tomorrow, render video, check UAI, panic/celebrate/think “I was anxious about that?”/get over it, do inventory here, then pack a van full of gear (oh and need to find boxes for my LCDs… should do that now actually, bit worried about them) and go and panic some more about how I have not enough cameras and not enough cables. Of course, if I have no cameras then the absence of cables ceases to be such a sensitive issue. Just gotta pray lots about it… there’s not really much more I can do at this point.
Oh, and if my posting about this strikes anyone as being in a more concerned tone than with previous events, it’s because this little excursion into vision is something new for me. I’ve encountered all this stuff before, but never in the capacity that if something screwed up during the event it’d be considered my fault ;-) Well, you know, shots of the wrong ‘guest speaker’ at SACS speech night betrayed by an uncertain zoom out aside. Doo bee doo.