Headless Moron

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Weekend Report
jawapro
Mon 12/05/2008 07:04 PM

Well - it’s been a while since I posted, so I’d better make this a good one.

On Friday (the day after Thursday) I was supposed to be going to Hobart for work. Thanks to an un-cooperative Telstra, that plan had to be canceled. As I’d made plans for Friday night, Work was very nice and let me take half of Friday off (they owed me because I worked last weekend anyway).

So I drove down to Hobart in time to go to the flicks with Tom (Nifen) to see Iron Man. It wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great either. About what you’d expect from yet another comic-come-movie.

^ Huh - what did you say?

The coolest part of the movie was the fact that they stole some of it from the StarCraft 2 trailer.

^ Even in black and white - I look cooler!

Follow this link to watch the relevant parts.

http://www.celestialorder.net/showthread.php?t=5790

The Starcraft trailer did it better though.

Anyway - after the movie I went and crashed at my sisters (after taking her out for tea at KFC). We watched some movies and things - and it was late when I went to bed.

The next morning I slept in - which was deliberate, because I knew it would be another late night.

It was TurkeyBrain’s birthday.

^ Really! What a surprise! I'd forgotten.

Well, actually Turkey’s birthday was the previous Sunday, but the party was on Saturday.

So we all went up the bush and killed each other.

LASER SKIRMISH!

^ Sir, we have prisoners!

I died once - which wasn’t a bad effort. We kicked the other team all three rounds.

In the base assault round, we apparently killed them all with 5 minutes to spare - but someone was still shooting at me with only 2 minutes to go. I was on your team idiot!

Turkey was on the other team - so it wasnt him.

I did manage to kill Benny Ling Bling Thing at least once - which I was quite happy about. He’s a Mac user!

After that we headed back to Turkey’s and had a massive BBQ. We also watched ‘We were Soldiers’ which I had never seen (I thought I had though).

We also did some file sharing (typical geeks) where Martin got a virus from someone’s removable hard-drive, and possibly passed it on to mine. Benny was quite proud of the fact that he was immune to the virus. He was also immune to the network apparently, and had a heap of trouble getting anything at all.

^ My Mac might be useless, but at least I don’t get viruses.

Martin (Turkey) was also happily showing off his Digital SLR camera. It totally pwns my camera, but then again - it did cost at least 3 times as much.

Alistair’s camera didn’t quite make the grade.

We eventually went back to Emma’s. We stayed there again, and got up early enough to get down to Taranna (near Port Arthur) in time for church.

I managed not to go to sleep during church, which was quite an achievement (because I was tired, not because of the sermon).

The reason we went to Taranna was because it was my Grandpa’s 70th birthday party.

Another feast, and a quite enjoyable party.

^ A random party photo.

^ And another one.

My cousin Daniel was there and quite keen to show off his new car (he’s on his 14th car, and he’s quite a few years younger than me! I'm only on my 2nd). I don’t seem to have taken any photos of the car though. It was some Holden thing with an air-filter sticking out of the bonnet.

And just to add some excitement, we lost 4 of the kids. They had been having a pillow fight, and been sent outside to have a walk. When it came time to cut the cake, we realized no one could find them.

People went off searching in all directions, and eventually discovered that they had walked home (well, where 2 of them lived). We then had to find all the people who’d gone looking for them.

By the time we’d found everyone, even my cousin Tom had managed to make it back from work. He works at a local restaurant, and as it was also Mother’s Day, he’d had a lot of washing up to do.

Strangely, he wasn’t very keen to do the washing up after the party (although, I cant say I did any either).

Even Uncle Day made it down to the party. Uncle Charlie took a wheel-chair friendly vehicle up to Hobart to pick him up. Grandpa wasn’t expecting him (he’s grandpa’s brother) so it made for quite a surprise.

And then on the way home, I finally fell asleep. Not a good plan when you’re driving.

Fortunately, Mum and Dad were in a separate car, and Mum took over driving mine.

^ So that was my weekend - how was yours? (I lent my camera to a cousin, hence the odd photo).

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Help my sister win a trip to England - and she might take me!
jawapro
Mon 05/05/2008 04:09 PM

Ok - for those of you who are regular visitors - you might remember when I won a Vespa from Microsoft by blogging.

Or when I got an Xbox for making a movie of that blog.

Well - the competition is back on again and almost over. 10 days to go.

My sister is entering this time (I cant - I'm not a student anymore). So if you have a few minutes to spare - go to her website and leave a comment.

http://randomness-and-chaos.blogspot.com/2007/12/lament-for-laptop-i-had-trusty-little.html

If she gets enough comments - she might get the 'viewers choice' or whatever it's called - which is a trip for 2 to England. And I might be the other half of that '2'!

So read the poem, and leave a comment. Dosnt take long. Help 'Littlesis' try and win the prize!

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Where does this website keep going?
jawapro
Sat 03/05/2008 09:31 PM

Some of you may have noticed that this website has been having some trouble lately. Sometimes it works - sometimes it doesn't.

You are not alone - the same thing has been happening to me.

I think its a left-over of the server move my hosting company did a few days ago. I believe its DNS problems - to be specific.

With any luck - the problems will clear up in a day or two as all the DNS servers update their records to point to the new servers.

This effects all my domains (headlessmoron.com, jawapro.com, overlordofharmony.com, and those I host for my friends such as turkeybrain.com, tommyhl.com, etc).

Stay with it - things should settle down shortly.

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Itunes Experiement
jawapro
Sat 03/05/2008 12:45 AM

Itunes is either a great idea - or a flawed concept, depending on who you ask. Personally I think the idea is great - but the execution is really lame.

Plus - with the Apple logo on the software, things arnt exactly looking good for it.

I had toyed with the idea of using Itunes a few times over the years. But the stupid thing wont let you browse the catalouge without installing the software - so you can't tell if it's even worth it before you install it.

And one the occasions I did install the software - they didnt have any songs I wanted anyway.

The whole point of Itunes SHOULD be to be able to access old or odd songs. If its only used for the current popular stuff - that's pointless - you can get that at the supermarket on CD! The best thing about Itunes SHOULD be getting rare stuff - but sadly it dosnt do too well in that regard.

I have odd tastes in music.

Anyway - I cant say I hate everything Apple has ever made - the Quicktime format/player is great for trailers (dont like it for anything longer though). So I decided to give Itunes another shot.

I installed it, and finally found something I wanted to get that I couldn't get easily on CD.

It's an album of kids dinosaur songs by "Brian Dullaghan & The Funky Fossil Band".

I had this album on cassette when I was a kid (still do).

The ablum is full of songs about dinosaurs. Its pretty cool for a kids album. We used to listen to it a lot and dance around to the songs.

In fact - I remember one day when Marcus (from up the road) was down and we were dancing to the tape. Marcus got a little over-the-top and was shaking the whole house. Mum sent him outside - so he had to dance on the other side of the window. Well - it was funny at the time.

I havent had much success transfering it to digial though - and I cant find it on CD anywhere (even ebay hasnt helped yet).

So I decided I'd give Itunes a whirl and get the album (cost $11 or so).

I tried to make an account - and it demanded my credit card details. I didnt want to give those details to apple - so that was as far as I got.

I gave up for a while.

Eventually a half-friend/half-arch-enemy of mine told me how to sign up using a gift voucher instead of a credit card. So I bought a $20 voucher today, and tried to sign up.

Once again - it demanded a credit card.

After a bit more hunting - I finally managed to sign up using only my voucher - but they dont make it easy.

So I bought the album and a few other songs to use the money.

The download process is nice and easy - but thats about the best I can say for it.

As a store, Itunes isnt too bad - but as a player, it's hopeless.

Sure - it can do the basics - but it's ugly and difficult, and I hate it.

But Itunes in it's wisdom, encodes all music with DRM (Digital Rights Management). It's designed to stop you sharing your songs with the internet - and thus prevent piracy.

What it also means is that only Itunes or Ipods can play your songs. I dont own an ipod, and I hate itunes as player - so that's not acceptable.

The other option is to burn the songs to a cd as audio. So I did that.

The first CD burn failed and Itunes carked itself (good old quality Apple software).

A reboot later I was able to convince Itunes that it wasnt still burning the first cd (which was in the bin by that stage).

So a new blank cd - and this time it worked.

So from there I called upon the services of Winamp - my media player of choice. Winamp ripped the tracks off the audio cd to MP3s.

I finally had straight MP3s of my music.

Then I had to rename them correctly.

But it's done now - I can listen to my songs in comfort.

Sadly for Itunes - piracy is so much easier. Just find and download - and it's there as perfect MP3s with correct names and everything. The attempts to stop piracy are the single biggest reason to pirate stuff.

Of course, the money factor is a reason to pirate stuff - but the ease of piracy compared to jumping through hoops to be legal is probably bigger.

But for now I can listen to "Triceratops Rock" and wonder why on earth we used to dance to it.

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Borrowed Router
jawapro
Thu 01/05/2008 09:31 PM

I'm Back!

Well - turns out that I cant get my missing posts back - so I have to start again.

If you have been following my recent posts - you'll know I was having trouble with my internet lately. Well - it got worse.

On Thursday last week, it stopped all together. I managed to figure out that Thursday was the day my old house's connection was turned off - so it was probably an account thing rather than my modem playing up.

I eventually managed to get someone to give me the Internode number (Thanks Turk!) as I didnt have access to the net to find the number! I rang them on Anzac day and they were suprisingly helpfull.

It was an account problem - as I'd though. They fixed it, and we were away.

Dad, Mum, and Emma were at my place for the weekend, and Mum and Emma had uni homework to do. I connected them to my internet via the wireless - and it worked fine.

After they left, I turned off the wireless connection on my router. I've had unprotected wireless for ages - but I figured I should finally protect myself.

Stupid me!

Of course - that night, my modem died completely. Well, the ethernet (LAN) part of it. So I couldnt get on the net - and I couldnt even get into the modem to turn the wireless back on (I could have used the laptop otherwise).

So I went shopping looking at modems. There are some local ones - but none I was overly taken by. I'd rather get a good one off the net - but that means waiting for it to turn up.

I mentioned it at work - and fourtuantly, work had a spare router I could borrow. It's only a dodgey single-port Telstra thing, but it's enough to get me going for now.

So I'm back on the net.

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