I really hate this habit I’ve got into of doing weekly updates. It’s partly because I’ve been busy with other stuff, partly because I’ve got nothing of interest to write about (not that I do normally, but you get that) and partly that I’ve lost interest. Yep, the buzz I used to get out of posting absolute poppycock to this site has slowly and surely worn off. A large contributing factor to this is the workload from uni (which is just about over), but other factors such as on-going problems with the web site host (which is fine when they are working, but the problems are frequent and at times severe) just seem to grind away at my interest.

Maybe something inside me has changed, I’ve lost interest in lanning to a large degree to the point that leech lans sound more interesting than largeish gaming lans. I’ve even been thinking of re-kindling some of my older interests in the hope of maybe meeting more interesting people. The issue of next year has also been looming over my head. What to do? Get a job? Where? Move out of home (again) or not? I’ll probably end up doing the obvious apply for jobs at major industry in my area, stay at home and save up cash until I decide what I really want to do. After a recent let-down by someone who I thought was my friend I’ve been forced to reevaluate what friendship really means. I’m not going to go into this, nor am I going to talk about it, because I frankly don’t want to.

The other side of the coin:

Bubblegum Crisis and one Dark angel episode were captured and encoded this week, along with Kristy’s appearance on The Weakest Link.

I did some research into wireless networking while I was wondering around the house with a 30m blue trailing cable (Cat 5), damn my laptop is fine now its got more ram. Pity these wireless lan cards are so damn expensive, I might just have to rob some MayneLink van after it does a pickup at a local store at 9.10am every morning ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H err. In other news, I’m seriously thinking of making a suit case style case mod soon, maybe before new year.

The new bank account is working out slowly, so far I’ve got the Visa card number, a pin number and a letter telling me to collect the card from the branch after a certain date, which to date hasn’t passed.

I’ve started my last university essay assignment. It’s worth 10% and I will be finishing it ASAP. It’s more on Lisp. The other remaining assignments untill it is over are: the object model of a credit card only petrol bowser for OOA&D and the 3rd year project presentation.

Assignment distraction links:
The Art of Insulting @ E2
Ammusing comments in source code @ E2
There are stacks more in my history but I haven’t filtered them out yet.

I got more blank cd’s on Monday, and haven’t opened them yet, how sad is that.

“What happens if a big asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.” — Dave Barry

The Irish team beat the Australian team in what looks like a cross between multiple ball sports and AFL. The unique scoring system is indeed, unique. Visualize: 4 poles, 1 cross bar, and a net. Think of this, the standard AFL goal (4 poles, vertical, center 2 are taller than outer 2), add the standard soccer goal in the middle, so now you’ve got 4 vertical poles, a cross bar and and a net behind the center pair of poles and below the cross bar. Scoring is like this: Between center pair of poles and above the cross bar, 6 points, between center pair of poles, below cross bar, 3 points, between either of other poles is 1 point. They use a (round) soccer ball and play on a rectangular field (looks like a rugby field based on the lines painted on the grass). Damn funny. Now I’m sorry I don’t tape the news for funny things like this.

Captured Bubblegum Crisis just now, and Dark Angel on thursday night.

I further tweaked blackbox (a window manager) so maximizine a window is saner, or more to my liking, I’m tweaking some of the associated window placement code, then I’ll post the patch somewhere. Somewhere during this I was playing with Mplayer and came across a memory manger bug in the linux kernel that I happen to be running. It goes along the lines of this: when the disk buffer + system cache exceed 796 meg the kernel reclaim thread (kreclaimd) starts memory cleaning (defragmenting I’m lead to believe). This could be fine normally, but when the CPU (or CPUs) are under load the thread will be preempted to a higher priority (which should also be fine). Where it starts sucking is when the thread has such a high priority that it’s taking CPU cycles away from a useful task. In my case the useful task was watching a DVD (ooh, on an unsupported platform with a free player … rebel) and the suckage was the DVD was skipping even though the CPU usage for actually playing the DVD was well withing the abilities of the system, and there was crap loads of ram free (in this case, crap loads is about 800 meg). This bug was noted by Tridge himself on LKM here. (For those not in the know, Tridge, or Andrew Tridgewell is the Aussie Guy who wrote Samba and (that great mirroring tool) Rsync.)

I’m out of blank cds. I opened a new bank account. Umm yeah thats about it.

Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. — Leonard Brandwein

Doc’s changed his site again. I captured Bubblegum Crisis and Dark Angel again. Spanner posted a bad pic about me again. Wait, that’s a first. Apparently the “holidays” (and I use the term lightly) are just about over. No idea where they skuttled off to either.

I lost a CD that I burned recently (last month or so). This is a bad thing since there is something on it that I’m looking for. This cd is one that I’m sure has been missing since the BGA lan after which I was sure I was missing a CD, due to the space left in the CD wallet. I’ve honestly got no hope in hell of ever seeing it again so I’m trying to remember exactly what was on it, which is the hard part, because it’s not cataloged in my cd catalog program.

That little Walan thingie went down rather well. I think I got about 50 odd gig of stuff. Last count I had obtained about 25 new DVD rips, and a heap of anime and other assorted stuff. The quake3 tourney went down rather well. 64 player double elimination (except first round was single elimination due to time restrictions). CaptVeg won again (like we didn’t see that coming). Much fun was had by all involved. I know know who this Peppy character is, and he’s like 13 or something !

If I haven’t posted it, Bluemidgit’s been up for over a year now. I cleaned my desk while I was in post lan recovery mode.

SWGN tomorrow, 86 people on the list as I type.

Where there’s a will, there’s an Inheritance Tax.