25 Aug 2004
Wooo. Happy to report that it went a thousand times better than the trials, so that was most excellent. Nerves kicked in where they hadn’t been seen before (Sophie?! Nervous?! Apparently so…), but the performances were generally excellent (better than last year, so far as my memory serves) in all facets.
That’s been my last two and a half days at school, pretty much. It was excellent, actually. An event completely sans certain medling staff members! My goodness! Hehehe. We still don’t have monitor audio in the booth, so we settled for physically removing the windows from the frame. That middle one had some nasty glass shards flying from it as we tried to put it back in, but the other two were okay(-ish). No, not joking ;)
Hmm. What else did we do? Oh, yes. Who remembers the old clock that was on the wall in the auditorium? Yeah… it came down a while ago, and had been sitting in the booth in the way, doing a whole lot of not much.
So we went in for some interior re-decoration! There was this sturdy looking thumbtack, see. And the walls were notably poorly plastered. So it was time (haha) to make another hole to mount something of our own… observe:
Do you think it looks nice on there? I think it looks nice on there. We left it up at the end of today, at any rate, so other users of that space will be able to appreciate the passing of time with style!
In other news, I have a modern assessment to complete, so I’d best be going to patch that up. Keep ticking…
25 Aug 2004
Just stumbled across this website, http://www.zimoblog.com/. It’s not audio, or even text-to-speech, but it’s a cool extension of blogging technology.
No idea what costs are involved, if any, and it looks like you need to use their proprietry service (at a glance only, I didn’t look too closely).
Original post
Followup 1
25 Aug 2004
I bought a new 3.5mm to 1/4” adapter yesterday, because the old one had been abused to the extent that it wasn’t listenable if I were to move the cable on my headphones at all… a problem for music where headbanging is a requirement!
Yeaaah. Anyway. As you’d probably guessed from the title, I’m liking this new thing. There are so many potential points of failure in my audio setup at the minute, but it seems like (at least on this line) that was the only thing wrong with it. So bad were the connections, in fact, that it was actually increasing impedence across the circuit to a noticable extent (audibly, even when the connector was “working”). And this one does stereo without dropping out, so that’s nice.
I have no idea what I did to that last adapter, but it was seriously dead. It’s been relegated to my in-tray, which sits about 15cm high at the minute (no, not joking). That of course means that I’ll likely never see it again, as I haven’t scheduled myself a reminder to dispose of it.
Annnnd the modern essay is finished, for those who hadn’t guessed. I’m not happy with it, but screw it. Left another assessment too late. The only one of this batch I theoretically haven’t screwed up was one which required no study and was a gift. Haha, the irony is, I dropped that subject ;) I’m told I went well, but the rumour is yet to be confirmed with official sources, and I don’t care to myself, so thinking I got 28/30 is good enough for me. Those two marks are going to nag me, though…
No, I still have no idea what the maths test I may or may not be sitting tomorrow is. I think I am throughly screwed. I have first period in studyhall to work it out.
22 Aug 2004
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm?id=1304&show=replies
Oh. My. Goodness. That’s cheaper than my current plan, and better geared towards my bandwidth usage patterns!
And, at only $3 a GB if I go over, it doesn’t matter either way (well, not much).
Ahhh!! Dilema!!! iiNet are just on the brink of announcing more DSLAM rollouts, with semi-unlimited upload speeds… I guess I’ll wait for that list to be unveiled before trying to make any further decisions on this one.
What exists in Sydney in the way of consumer (i.e. not business) VoIP gateway services? And can you use fax over VoIP? I’m so ready to ditch the phone line and go over this entirely: currently, we’re paying $25 for line rental, and $60 for ADSL a month. I don’t know what we’re paying in calls, but it’d be enough.
This would be $0 in line rental, $45 for internet access, and some amount of telephony costs – if nothing else, we’d save massively interstate/long distance and international. Even if voice usage consumed large-ish amounts of bandwidth, I can’t see it using more than a GB per month (so, add $3 to telephony costs) — that’s based on the fact that if I stream a 192kbps stream for 8 and a half hours, it only uses about 900MB — and it’s safe to presume that VoIP won’t be anywhere near that sort of quality!
Meh, can’t think about it now… still got this stupid assessment unfinished, must keep working. More to post, but that actually requires thought, not just techno-babble, so it will come in a while…
**EDIT: ** More has been posted, and backdated to when it actually SHOULD have appeared. See article 106, “A feast for sore eyes” for more!
22 Aug 2004
Just got around to installing GRI’s Anti-Virus software on the crappy Pentium box (running ’98, one of two remaining Windows computers in this household — and switches across on that one have been considered… more than a few times before). Twenty minutes later, it’s lost 14 separate viruses… hopefully this will mean that the stupid thing stops creating network storms whenever it is turned on and plugged in to everything else.
I really don’t see WHY viruses are created! My goodness! The creators don’t really stand to GAIN from it, and viruses aren’t (for the most part) actually THAT harmful — just bloody annoying and time consuming! Bleh. I have no idea exactly what any of those fourteen viruses did… there were some trojans in there, but it really had minimal impact, what with ipchains and NAT running on my Coyote box (that said, I don’t know how much longer I’ll stick with Coyote on that thing… starting to get itchy fingers, wanting to switch it over to Slack or Debian or something and run Samba and Apache, amongst other things, on it.)
Aside from that, I just finished the “product” I’m submitting for this next assessment task (business studies) — they’re only getting a paper manual, though, because source-code is more than I would ever trust that department with, regardless as to it’s actual value (in man hours or anything else: my IP (or clients IP, depending on how you look at it) is more valuable than any crappy assessment they can throw our way).
Hmm. I’m going to go and work like crazy for about an hour, so I’ve got time to get down to church this evening. Assessments are bad. Or rather, the importance I place on them is bad. Last weekend was pretty terrible… I ended up leaving after our bible study and before church last week, because of my complete lack of time management with that Extension task!
Back to business…