The title says more than it should, it's not true, but I could have slept through the data comms exam and still passed. How you ask... not very hard, I was done in about 1 hour 30 mins, and then proceeded to make sure I wasn't missing a page or something. Not bad, considering I did fill the 7 page answer book. Maybe that was clue one. They normally start you out with a 15 page book. Clue number two could have been the fact that the multiple choice questions were worth 3 marks each (and there were 14 of them). The whole (3 hour) exam was worth 70 marks, thats 2.5 minutes per mark (roughly) or about 7.5 minutes per multi choice (or guess) question. Still, it was open book, perhaps that was clue number three. The night before, or should I say earlier the same day I made 2 pages of notes, A4 back to back, not a single side was full, but I took notes on the whole course, (sans a few unlikely topics). This is probably where I learned the unit, within the 9 hours before the exam and that included some hours sleeping and driving there. I left the room after about 2 hours working time, about the norm I think.

I don't know how long this link will work for, but here's a link to ebay where someone sold a url to a place to get a Geforce3 cheap. Bidding closed at $255 (USD). Yes, a $255 URL, as in something you type in to your location bar in your web browser, usually of the form http://www. something .com or similar. Like German tourists the stupid are everywhere, and in this case, there were 21 bids.

Moving right along, I don't know where I found this but either way it's worth a look. I'll call it article001.jpg. I was scared, that's some hair. My wallpaper changed. (The last 2 facts are completely unrelated by the way.) I got my superannuation payout today.

If life is merely a joke, the question still remains: for whose amusement?

I got Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 Episode 5, even though I wasn't home. That takes l33t skillz to press the record button on the capture program while I was out (over 50km away in fact), VHS is so passe when it comes to quality compared to MJPEG. I'm still thinking a MiniDV camcorder is the way to go though, 3.8meg a second capture (not that I can't do that now (I've had 6.5 meg a second flawless capture on one of my drives (not the newest one either))) 60min tapes.

I spent some time wandering around town around midnight tonight, odd I know, but it happened. Also we went to the park and played on some swings and stuff. I find it quite ammusing the number of people you see staggering around the streets at midnight, and they think you look stupid with your taslon ski pants strutting your stuff with the Bee Gees (Stayin' Alive of course) playing in your head (doesn't everyone have built in MP3 players yet?), things like that remind my why I don't drink and stuff, and people say I don't have a life, mwhahaha. Yes.

You know it's late when you drive home not seeing another car (other than someone you just saw leave the same place you left), and your trip home takes 37 minutes in good weather (sticking to speed limits, less if your late for an exam (as you do)).

Time for more chicken talk: I nearly got my PCMCIA floppy drive working in linux, nearly, I got so close that I nearly watched a Macgyver episode on my laptop. That's right folks, DivX on my laptop, and it doesn't even have X-Windows (eg XFree86 perhaps) installed. Blame the very l33t Mplayer which can render video to SVGAlib. I say nearly for a reason, it doesn't have the raw CPU power to do it :( Mplayer is optimised well, to the point I only get a skip every 2 seconds or so, but still that's not good enough to watch stuff on it. Decoding the audio to wave helps, (as MP3 decoding takes nearly 15% of the CPU on this system (no cache baby)) but still isn't enough. One can dream. Oh and about the floppy driver, it's getting there, it compiles, but the module doesn't insert. You wouldn't believe how much the floppy driver has changed between Linux 2.2 to 2.4. It looks like close to a total rewrite. Scary fact number 1: The floppy driver (2.4 version) has GOTO statements. No bull.

SWGN signups at 60 right now. Portland's FTP server is still down. 500 FTP server shut down (System shutdown at Fri Jun 15 16:50:10 2001) -- please try again later. is the error message, which CuteFTP dies on, because that's a protocol violation. According to RFC959 (the FTP RFC), response code 500 means Syntax error, command unrecognized. This may include errors such as command line too long, but since I had yet to even attempt to log in, I got this instead of a welcome message, damn you Portland, I haven't been able to ftp in once in the last month at least. Freedom2surf has a better policy than portland by the looks of things (not having used the service, what would I know?) Welcome to the Freedom To Surf signup page! Sorry - Our free webservers are currently full. At least they know their abilities.

Statistics means never having to say you're certain.

Yuppers. The software engineering 1 exam went fine just fine. As I type this, I'm listening to some mp3's I got off Kristy. Odd, very Disney, certainly brings back memories.

Also as I type this, I'm not online. Though I had been online for over 6 days, and the reason for me not being back online. Well this is the first time (since the telstra rack blew up a few months back, previously to that I'd never seen it engaged at all) iiNet's not been answering, so I dialed the number (with the phone) and got a lovely telstra lady saying the number I'm trying to reach is unreachable because its congested. Damn. (10 mins later its fine, call diversion fault I'm thinking).

Signups for SWGN #5 seem to be full. We had some morons register several times (probably a mistake) and some deliberate additions with not so real nick names. Not to worry, we have the power captain. The Uwalan is the previous weekend, should be good.

Would you believe that I've basically run out of things to download, and don't say Gnutella (or Gnotella, or Limewire or any other similar thing). It's bad, I'm really suffering, maybe I should reinstall before I find something big. It's not that I've got every episode of The Mysterious Cities of Gold, South Park (every episode to date, up to and including 417), Futurama (up to and including 315, though I'm still trying to get 315 in realmedia format). What else, hard to say. I've downloaded alot of shit over the years. Maybe I should stop and do something more productive like learn another language (spoken language, not programming language ... well I'd like to) or write a book (about what, downloading ?) I might be forced to start trolling on alt.binaries.tv.farscape and alt.binaries.startrek or similar groups, but that is just sad to me. Though I could look for funny sounding newsgroup names like; alt.g.wg.vb.n.imn.j.tnwvz.of.q.rrsdg.es.me.vkpnk (no kidding) alt.hackers.cough.cough.cough1 not to mention who the hell is montgomery-wood because he has like a few hundred news groups with his name in them (granted many of them are in alt.flame.* but not all), alt.talk.rec.soc.biz.news.comp.humanities.meow.misc.moderated.meow, alt.internet.providers.uk.businessserve-are-wank-dont-pay-them-a-penny and the swedish chef ones; alt.music.swedish-pop.bork.bork.bork, alt.stereo.death.bork.bork.bork alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork alt.walter-cronkite.swedish-chef.bork.bork.bork (Who on earth is Walter cronkite, they have a lot of groups about them too, oddly enough alt.who.the.feck.is.walter.cronkite didn't help ...). It really helps having a newsgroup list with 37000 groups on it. I think this one sums up the lot alt.who.the.hell.is.making.all.these.stupid.newsgroups.

Um gesh dee bork, bork!

It's hard to think of you as the end result of millions of years of evolution.

I thought I might as well post my notes for Software Engineering 1 just in case they can be of any use to someone out there (unlikely). Keep in mind that these notes are for the whole semester and must not be assumed to be correct in any way. Standard disclaimer applies.

Enough blab, here they are. (yes its one jpeg 35kb in size (once portland's freakin ftp server is back up. I might be hosting it myself on the end of a stinkin 19200bbs connection soon if this persists) Currently hosted on iinet). Page and chapter numbers may be of use to someone. The phone number at the top is Rainers. Note the tallys of arrival times for Steve and Peter, usually run by bookie Russ. Enjoy and don't bitch if these are of no use or interest to you.

I went to Big W today looking for some DVD's I was going to buy and couldn't find any of em. Damn. I couldn't be bothered driving all the way into town to check out target. So I went home instead.

A man can face the most dangerous challenge so long that he believes he can master it. I've learnt that from you Mendoza. (Estaban, The Mysterious Cities Of Gold, Ep 39)