Still As Life

You may recall my post about when I saw The Golden Compass last month. If not, to recap, I didn't think it was very well put together, and was not a good movie.

Rhi loved it, my sister loved it etc, I did not like it.

I just came across a post by Paul Jenkins over at Pauls Blog that pretty much echoes my opinion of The Golden Compass. However, he added another perspective to it that I hadn't even thought of.

He noticed that the story has vast similarities to the original Star Wars story. I find this quite funny really, but it is very true. The story is remarkably similar, except of course, Star Wars was actually good.

For example, as Paul pointed out, in reference to Star Wars, The Magisterium from The Golden Compass is trying to control the world, similarly to The Empire of Star Wars. At the same time, the Gyptians defy them and rescue Lyra. This can of course be referenced to the Rebels of Star Wars rescuing Luke and Leia Skywalker. Luke can use The Force, Lyra can operate the Golden Compass. The most obvious thing though, that I really can't believe I didn't see, near the end of The Golden Compass, Mrs Coulter, the main antagonist reveals to Lyra that she is actually her mother! Oh my! Darth Vader, the main antagonist of Star Wars reveals near the end that he is indeed, Luke's father!

The book was published in 1995, clearly after Star Wars was released in 1977 kind of makes one wonder about it. Ah wells, perhaps I should stop being so cynical.

My apologies to anyone that liked it, but I really don't see what the great appeal of it was/is.

Labels: movies, rants

The past month, I have been brainstorming and experimenting with idea's on new and interesting (to me) things to do on the web.

So far I have a few things. Of course, high up on the list is to market TerraMedia and Ultralight more, but at the same time, there have been other things come up as a result of that.

Company and product image.

For example, I have been trying to come up with a new and interesting logo for TerraMedia. I did a subject at university first semester last year that was based entirely around product and company image, through logo's, packaging and so on. KIB101, Foundations of Communication Design 1 is the subject. Great subject, I learned a lot doing it. The problem is, I could not get past one of my early logo idea's which I realised after I finished it, that it was very similar to the old Sony Walkman logo which is a trade mark, and while it's not the same, I didn't particularly like the idea of Sony having a reason to come after me. Thus, I ended up with the current logo, which is nothing too special, I like it, but it's not what I would ideally like.

So, this is something I have been aiming to change. I still don't really have anything set in stone yet, but I have some idea's that I am working on since my mind has seemingly been freed of it's mental block at the moment. How long this will last I cannot say, but hopefully for a while yet.

In working on this new logo, I have also been considering redesigning the TerraMedia website, and reworking it to better fit my new marketing strategy (which is at the moment still in it's planning stages, so I can't give you details because it is not yet in an entirely logical structure and will most likely come across as a bunch of babble). I spent a couple of hours with Rhi on Sunday afternoon brainstorming possibilities in this regard, and along with things I have since come up with on top of our combined masses of brain power, I think we have some very interesting idea's that I plan on experimenting with. I'd show you, but that would ruin the surprise.

Rhi is also helping me out with the new logo design which is awesome as she is a fantastic artist! So a big thanks goes to her!

Portfolio.

Next on the list is a possibility I have been throwing around in my mind and have just begun experimenting with using Joomla!

Joomla! comes with a weblinks component when you install it, and that, combined with part of my new marketing strategies has thrown into the works a directory style portfolio. In a way, like a Yellow Pages of web site's by TerraMedia. Of course, there aren't that many at this stage, and it probably doesn't sound like much, but the idea's that are whizzing through my mind regarding this have me really intrigued about setting it up. I have something partially working at the moment. I'm hoping to get it up and running properly within the next couple of weeks.

This also is a reason behind the changes I would like to make in the design of the TerraMedia website. The current design does not incorporate any real portfolio the way I would like, thus it does not have one, which is not a good thing, in fact, it is a very bad thing.

Next up is email.

I have a Microsoft Exchange Server partially setup for TerraMedia. It's still in it's trial phases at the moment, but I am hoping to have it setup properly soon. This will make maintaining my email's, contacts and calendar (why does the spelling of calendar look wrong?) far easier from all over the world, not that I'm frequently all over the world, but you never know.

Once the Exchange server is fully setup and operational, TerraMedia will be offering it as a service instead of our current webmail/POP3 email service, if anyone is interested, pricing will be sorted out shortly. I aim to have this fully operational within the next couple of weeks as well to coincide with my plans.

Blogging.

I am planning on rearranging the news and client information blogs so that they are one and the same rather than two separate ones. I also accidentally blocked myself from allowing RSS, ATOM and OPML feed's from the news page, which is potentially problematic and another driving factor of a new design.

Blogging part 2.

Still As Life is still running off of what is essentially a standard template. Yes, I have changed it significantly. Background image, size, footer, menu etc, but it is still basically a standard template. This I do not like. In my brainstorming for TerraMedia, I stumbled across the foundations of a new design for Still As Life hiding in the dark, atramentous recesses of my mind.

So this is underway as well. I have it in progress, on the Still As Life server, but I'm not going to give you the link because that would ruin the surprise. If you can figure out the path to it though, enjoy and keep in mind that it is still in progress and the colours are far from final.

More Still As Life?

Yes, there is more. Still As Life was not originally intended to be solely the home of the personal blog of me, Matthew Brown. No, it was also meant to be a haven for my fractal gallery. Yes yes, there is my Deviant Art gallery, which does give me unlimited space and bandwidth for free. However, it is not really what I want. I have been tossing around ideas in my mind ever since I first began considering names for this blog. There is actually an installation of Coppermine Photo Gallery setup on this server and has been since I set up the domain. It's just one of those things that never quite went ahead.

Is there anymore?

As a matter of fact, yes! I just don't remember what else there was at the moment, that was actually part of the reason for this blog, so I don't forget everything. Oh well, I'll remember sooner or later. I actually have paper with stuff on it all over one of my walls for this reason as well, however this is one of the things that hadn't made it to paper yet. Though Rhi thinks the paper makes it look like I have gone mad with illegible scribble writing and drawings that look like they are part of the writing and so on. I am happy being mad.

Last but not least, in my creative and un-mentally blank mood, I have been doing some drawing (that does not look like scribble) as well. I have the outlines of a picture that I am quite proud of so far. Hopefully the rest of it will work right and I don't end up with, well, badness.

Labels: code, design, internet, rants, work

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, "Microsoft says hackers have found a way to use some older versions of its Excel spreadsheet program to take over control of people's computers."

They then later go on to say:

"Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Excel Viewer 2003, Excel 2002, Excel 2000 and Excel 2004 for Mac all contain the security hole."

And finally end with:

"The most recent versions of the spreadsheet program, Excel 2007, Excel 2007 SP 1 and Excel 2008 for Mac, were not thought to be affected, Microsoft said."

Now, I have had a look on the Microsoft Excel Developers Blog, and there is no indication of this on there.

Nor is there anything on the Microsoft Press website, in general, or in the Security section.

This leaves me thinking two things.

1. This is either shocking reporting, or they somehow have inside news that Microsoft hasn't released on their website yet.
2. This is a marketing ploy in the wake of the amount of people that find the so called "innovative" ribbon system in Office 2007 painful and confusing to use and find Office 2003 much better in general.

If it is option 2, it would make sense. Office 2007 is quite pitiful really, yes, it does have useful things over 2003, but in general, 2003 is much simpler to use, and I know a great many of your "everyday users" that 2007 is meant to benefit, who spend hours trying to figure out how to do things they could do in 2003 in seconds.

This is a large part of their market that is choosing to either not upgrade at all, or revert back to 2003. So there needs to be some reason for them to spend money to upgrade to 2007. A security flaw that has all of a sudden been discovered in previous versions and not making any comment as to whether it will be fixed or not, that sounds like a pretty good way to motivate your everyday user.

Note that this is purely speculation on my part.

However, I do not think that option 2 is all that likely, if it were, there should be something obvious on the Microsoft website about it.

If anyone knows of anywhere on the Microsoft website about this, that would be great.

In the meantime, I will just assume that this is some very bad reporting on the part of the un-named journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald.

Labels: rants, software

Here is another Unreal Tournament 3 trailer, because I can.



Also because I noticed a couple of comments on this particular trailer which is an old one from back when it was called Unreal Tournament 2007. The comments though are only recent.

A user called thekillersfan01 makes the comment:

"this looks good but a rip off from gears of war"

Following in his idiotic footsteps very soon after, glenny112 makes the comment:

"rofl u nubs this is a re run of halo 2 and 1 and also a re write of gears of war!"

I propose three things, one being the following:

Thekillersfan01, you should read the below.

Two being:

Glenny112, you are the "nub." If you knew anything about gaming history, you would be well aware that Halo 2 was released on November 9, 2004. Now, following your illogical structure of referencing Halo 2 first, I will now point out that logically, Halo 1 was released prior to Halo 2. Halo 1 was released on November 15, 2001. Next, is Gears of War. Gears of War was released most recently on, you guessed it, November 7, 2006. Now, taking this into account, let us consider the following. The first Unreal was released when exactly? Let me see. Oh yes, May 22, 1998. The next in the series, Unreal Tournament was released when now? November 26, 1999. That is two games released prior to the first Halo which is the earliest released game of your claims. As for Gears of War, well, not only are there those two games, but Unreal Tournament 2003 released near the end of 2002, Unreal 2, released in February 2003, and then of course, Unreal Tournament 2004, released in March of 2004.

Now, you tell me which one is a "re write" of which.

Sure, I looked up the dates to get the exact day and month, and also to back up what I am saying, but I could have told you the year's those games were released off the top of my head give or take a year.

The final thing I propose is:

Glenny112, didn't you ever go to school? Do you know what spelling and grammar are? It's hard enough to take you seriously when you don't have any idea what you are talking about, let alone when you cannot even manage to type properly.

Now, after seeing the video here, I can understand thekillersfan01 making a simple mistake like that since his YouTube profile indicates he is from the USA. Glenny112 though, according to his profile is an Australian. Now that's just embarrassing.

Labels: games, rants, software, video clips

I received a phone call today from Vodafone to let me know that one of my pieces of identification used in my credit check for the application for the 3G modem wasn't acceptable. This is over a month since they told me the credit check was passed. I have also already paid my first bill including effectively a month in advance almost 2 weeks ago. Yet it takes them until now to decide that one of my points of identity was unacceptable, and only unacceptable because it was faxed. Which I was told at the time was okay.

So what do they want me to do? They want me to come in and bring it in so they can photocopy it and FAX the copy to the credit check people.

Maybe its just me but this seems like a complete waste of my time and the time of all of the parties involved.

Apparently it's not a priority so to just drop in with it whenever I get a chance. What if I don't get a chance? They didn't say anything about cutting off my service if I don't take it in, and my account is set to direct debit every billing cycle, so they don't even have to chase me to pay my bill unless there isn't enough money in the account, which there is because it's the account that I use to save money (ironic that the account that is saving money is also the one paying the monthly bills, but hey).

So does that mean I could just not take it in? They wasted 2 hours too many of my time the first time I went in there, so I have no reasonable inclination to want to go in again, let alone the time to go in and have another hour or 2 wasted.

Am I the only one that has this much trouble with Vodafone? Do they sense that I have my phone with Optus and when I get a new phone, it will most likely be with Optus, and I will never purchase a phone from Vodafone, so they make it difficult?

I would think it should be the opposite, try and motivate me to purchase a new phone with them. Oh well, to their detriment, if they didn't have the largest download quota for the cheapest with the most reasonable coverage, I wouldn't have gone with them at all in the first place.

Even my Mac is sad. Or it is when I use its speech function to say sad things....

I suppose it may not necessarily be Vodafone that is the problem so much. I bought the 3G modem through Crazy Johns as they were the only store in Garden City or Sunnybank Plaza at the time that had them in stock. So really, it was probably the people there who should have known better than to say that the fax was fine (though I still don't see why it wasn't anyway), and they were probably as much responsible for wasting my time as the people at Vodafone were.

Either way, I have decided Vodafone are efficient time-wasters and I won't be dealing with them anymore than I have to, nor will they be getting any more business from me outside this contract.

Labels: rants

I was just reading a post by Duncan Riley about the potential for banning of things that are commonplace and acceptable today, purely because of the possibility of porn being received via these channels.

Duncan outlines just a few possibilities, Second Life, Skype, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, Usenet, BitTorrent, Blogs, Twitter, regular Google searches and Image searches, internet archives including Google's caching system.

In addition to this, what else is there? If Skype has the potential to allow the receipt of porn and anything else deemed unacceptable, which it no doubt does, than logically so does MSN, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and so on. Any other search engine can potentially be used to search for porn as well as Google.

While I don't deny that a porn filter would be a great thing, if it could be done effectively, as I have said before, when you start this sort of mandatory filtering, not only does the question arise about where does the line get drawn on what content gets filtered, but where does the line get drawn on what methods. Duncan even offered up the fact that porn can potentially be received via email as well, and often is in spam.

So what things get filtered and what don't? As BitTorrent is often deemed as a means for illegal downloading, despite the huge amount of legitimate uses for it, the excuse to filter it out would no doubt be jumped at, but what about everything else?

To filter out all of the possible sources leaves us with practically no internet at all, and then at speeds reduced to up to 78% slower than our already slow connections.

Mr Rudd, you and your ministers need to let go of the controlling attitude and stop even discussing this possibility. When it comes down to it, the only viable solution is to let parents teach their kids and teach parents how to use software filters. If you want, provide education about it in schools. Don't try to filter out the vast majority of the internet though.

Labels: internet, politics, rants

With newspapers Australia wide running near identical articles on the latest announcement today from the Australian Labor Party, and blogs worldwide abuzz, I can't help but be astounded.

How is mandatory ISP level internet filtering a smart idea? Whether it causes a speed difference or not, which I believe it will, it makes me wonder how they can see this as viable at all.

What advice are they given? Do they not realise how rapidly content changes? How are they planning on maintaining the black list?

Will they ban IP's or IP ranges? Will they just waste my tax money paying people to trawl the ever changing, constantly evolving, millions of websites out there and individually choose what they think is appropriate for me to see?

Will my blog be inappropriate because I'm voicing my opinion about KRudd's failure to represent the people of Australia only a month into his leadership?

What a way to end 2007, but to announce a system that requires the citizens of Australia to opt out of a system that is not wanted in the first place.

I see the reason for it, there is the belief in some groups that the government should do their parenting for them but filtering content so that they don't have to actively monitor the activities of their children.

Okay, so maybe I'm being overly cynical, and sure, I can understand the desire for content filters for children, as exposure to unsuitable material is increasing in virtually every media, from television and radio, through to the internet. The difference with the internet is that it doesn't have a content rating on everything.

Really, in an unfiltered connection to the internet, a child could stumble upon virtually anything. A point in regards to this though is that the public school system already has filters in place for the internet connections through schools, or NSW does anyway, I am not 100% certain on other states. If NSW state education system can do it though, why couldn't they use a similar system in other states and throughout the various private schooling systems?

Then there are the public libraries, why can't they use this system as well? What other places can children access the internet? This just leaves the home. Who is responsible for the connection at home? Parents.

There are plenty of software filters available that can do this, but with the school kid that got around the system there's all that kerfuffle, but really, a kid could get around the ISP level if they wanted to. There are plenty of proxy servers out there that are relatively simple to use, though they can be slow and annoying.

So, if parents aren't taking the responsibility to actively educate their kids about what is suitable and what isn't, such as they would (one would hope), teach them when it is suitable and safe to cross a road. If the government has to take responsibility for this, then is it not telling parents that it's okay to not worry about what their children do on the internet, because there is a filter in place?

A filter cannot and will not block everything without effectively allowing only government approved websites and nothing else. So where does this leave us, well, for me, I see it as a waste of my taxes. Why on earth would I want to pay for something I don't want, then be required to opt out of it if I don't want it, then continue to pay for it anyway?

Should I choose to opt out, will that mark me as someone that should have my internet usage monitored? If i decide not to opt out, where is the line drawn on content filtering?

It is intended to be a porn filter, this is all well and good and I have to agree is a great idea, because even when actively monitoring a childs internet usage, there will no doubt still be some form of unwanted exposure. However, does it stop at that? Or once this method of control is in place, does it get taken further? Filtering out anything deemed inappropriate by those in power?

There are idea's thrown around all over the web, but something the springs to my mind is, regardless of whatever pressure is on the government for this filter, from whatever source, can they not see that if they put a filter like this in place, when it fails, it will come back on them? They are offering a sense of security. If, and I believe when, something that should be filtered isn't, who is to blame? The people maintaining the blacklist.

Duncan Riley makes an interesting point in his blog on TechCrunch, "Australia Joins China In Censoring The Internet" where he points out:

Notably Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was a former Australian Diplomat in China, and speaks fluent Mandarin; given Australia’s boom is fueled by mineral exports to China, it would seem that Australian Government policies are now by China in return.

An interesting thought, and is well and truly believable. Whether it is or not, who knows, regardless though, the day a filtering system such as this comes into effect is the day that the government is effectively given complete censorship control.

More information can be found on the Labor website.

Labels: internet, politics, rants

As you may recall, on the 4th of December, I joined up to the Vodafone 5GB wireless modem package. This has been working out quite well, it has kept me sane these past couple of days where I would not normally have had the internet and would have been stuck with a certain person who I really cannot stand. Yay for technology and it's associated magic.

Anyway, I received my bill earlier in the month. If you read my earlier post, or have been looking at this plan yourself, you would know it is $39 a month for 5gb of data usage, regardless of whether you are on the 3G network or the GSM network. The $39 a month includes the USB modem or PCMCIA card (I suggest the USB modem) for free.

Now I received my bill and it was not for $39. It was for $40.29. This amount made no sense at all, my bill made no sense as it looked like I had been charged twice for the month, and neither of the numbers made sense.

I have just spent half an hour plus on the phone to customer care about this and was transferred backwards and forwards between 2 different departments 3 times! The first 2 had no idea at all, even though the first was billing enquiries and the second was data billing enquiries.

Neither of them had any idea.

Finally, I got transferred back to general billing enquiries and got a different customer service representative who seemed to know what she was talking about.

It seems that unlike the other providers I have experience with, Vodafone don't have billing cycles everyday, so when you join up to Vodafone, you are put into whatever the next billing cycle is. In my case, the next one was on the 5th, and then you are billed twice to make up the extra time before the billing cycle.

I had a feeling it was just something like this, but when you are billed for more than you are expecting it's nice to know why. It definitely should not have taken half an hour to find out though. Surely anyone in any of their billing departments should know something like this and could have told me straight up in less than 5 minutes.

The thing that makes it really annoying, is that I never had to wait for someone to answer when I rang and when I was transferred. They always picked up straight away, so the half an hour spent trying to find out was almost all spent speaking directly to someone, there was no waiting time at all in that.

Labels: rants

Joe Wilcox from Microsoft Watch has some really great advice in his top 10 recommendations for 2008. It's just a pity that chances are, Microsoft won't take much of it on board.

I particularly like number 2, and I think this is something that would be really beneficial. There is nowhere that properly showcases Microsoft products, and while I'm not a big Microsoft supporter myself, I can see how this is a big problem. Look at any of the Apple stores, or even Myers and David Jones, they all have big Apple showcases, with Apple products setup so that customers can try them out.

Sure, at say Harvey Norman, there are heaps of Windows computers setup and on display, but often times the sales people don't really know that much about the computers. If Microsoft could properly showcase all of their products together and show off how well they work together when they are setup properly, as Apple does, it would no doubt benefit their sales, as well as customer satisfaction, as they would actually be able to see how things should work together and setup their own purchases the same way.

There is a lot of operating system functionality and software functionality in Windows and other Microsoft products that people don't know exists or just don't understand, so it never gets used, or when it does, it doesn't get used properly.

In addition, the Microsoft website can sometimes be difficult to navigate when you are looking for help on specific things unless you know where to look. For many people this is discouraging and so they give up on things because they don't understand them.

If Microsoft were to open some retail outlets and improve help and support through their website and other retail stores, it would really help out their customer satisfaction and overall sales. If people are happy with a product or service, they will recommend it, and often a recommendation from a trusted person will be worth much more than any advertising campaign will be.

Perhaps I'm completely wrong here, but I don't believe I am. Go to Myers or David Jones, and the Apple section always has far more people around trying out the Mac's than the Windows section that has everything locked in display cases.

Last time I was at Myers, I counted over 20 people surrounding 3 iMac's, 2 MacBook's and 2 MacBook Pro's, the Windows section was completely empty. That's a big difference.

As Joe says, "Think simple. Be social."

Labels: rants, software, technology

The web design company that we use at the store is at it again. This time though, instead of just providing us with a poor service, they are in fact blaming us for their problems.

Now, some of the things they were saying and suggesting are fair enough, yes we can control the addition of images and so on, but the reason that the images aren't right is because their system has been changing our images. I don't know why since I don't have access to the backend of the system. We have told them about this problem many times, yet when I spoke to them earlier about it and they tried to blame us for not doing things correctly, they were completely unaware of it and tried to say that it must be caused by a glitch in the system upgrade. However, it's been a recurring problem since well before they started upgrading it.

I have contacted them via email and phone about it 6 or 7 times and spoken to them about it in a meeting as well. So it should have been fixed a long time ago.

So why aren't they aware of it? An even better question, why are they blaming us for their problems? It does not do well for their image, or for both our and their business.

Since they started blaming us for things and been slow to act, if at all, on any problems, I have noticed my boss's satisfaction drastically dropping. I don't think it will take much more to push her into a different development company.

While they no doubt have other clients, one would think it would be important to keep them all happy. Blaming the client for something that is not their fault is a big way to push a client away and should definately be avoided. When it is the clients fault, it needs to be handled much more diplomatically then just blaming them outright.

Labels: internet, rants, work

Some people should just learn to keep their mouth shut. It amazes me how any one person can be as completely stupid as the woman in the clip below, yet she feels no embarrassment at all about a grade 5 student being smarter then her!





"I thought Europe was a country?"

"Is France a country?"

"I'm listening to what you're saying, but I only hear what I want to."

"Hungary...thats a country?"

Anyone related to her must be quite embarrassed...

Labels: rants

Well this is interesting, I just read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about energy ratings for computers. There have been a lot of things going on as far as energy conservation and greenhouse emissions goes lately around here. First there was the introduction of the star rating system for plasma and LCD tv's because of the (in my opinion) unfounded argument that they both use significantly more power than CRT's. Now this is fine really, except that I don't agree with much of what I read, but that's for another time.

Now though there is talk of a rating system for computers themselves, from 1 to 5 stars, similar to the system used on white goods like freezers and refrigerators. The article which can be found on the Sydney Morning Herald website from earlier today goes into findings and so on, and sure, I can see why greenhouse emissions need to be reduced and energy needs to be conserved, but as was pointed out in the article, "...most big-brand computer and component makers are already likely to be complying, as they must meet the stricter European laws to ensure global sales." So in this regards, the 24 million or so computers in Australia will be predominately from these big brand manufacturers. Optima, Dell, IBM, HP, Apple and the big brand laptops like Sony, Asus, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Apple and so on. So this means it will most affect the smaller computer stores that put together computers themselves.

These smaller companies are using your everyday components that you find on the shelf and many are not put together with minimum power consumption in mind. Many of the smaller computer store's I have been involved with don't even have the equipment to check the power consumption of a computer.

So any computer that doesn't meet the minimum standard will become illegal to sell. Currently it is being considered for implementation by 2009, so thats plenty of time for these smaller companies to sort out things like this, but I expect it will increase the cost of computers through the small stores and thus affect their sales and income.

This then raises another question for me, unless individual parts are made illegal to purchase, there is no way to police the power consumption of all the computers being produced. While it's not the main computer source, there is a large market of people who build their own computers and computer's for others at no charge. These people aren't going to be checking power consumption, and I don't see any way that this can even be checked.

Aside from making individual parts illegal, which I expect would be a very bad move for the government, the only way I can see for this to work is to put pressure on the component manufacturers to make each individual part meet power requirements, presumably also using a similar system. Of course, this is not unreasonable, but it is going to be quite difficult and a lot of work to implement. To make this worse, the configuration of a computer is near limitless, even in computers from a manufacturer like Dell, anyone can add something else without much difficulty. The only computer market that is even remotely controlled in this regard is the laptop market.

I mean, the chances of there being multiple computers setup exactly the same as my desktop are quite low. I know one person with the same motherboard and CPU as me, and a similar video card, but thats about it, and even in that regard, my motherboard is slightly different. Of course theres far more to it than that.

Power supply: Antec TrueBlue 480w
Motherboard: Asus A8N-E
CPU: Athlon 64 3500+ 939
RAM: 2x 512mb Kingmax DDR400
Video card: HIS Radeon X800 GTO 256mb, 256bit
Optical drive: LiteOn CDRW/DVD Combo Drive
Optical drive 2: Pioneer DVR-109 DVDRW
Wireless: Belkin 802.llg PCI wireless card
Additional HD Controller: Promise SATA1510 TX Series
Hard drive 1: Seagate 120gb PATA
Hard drive 2: Samsung 30gb PATA
Hard drive 3: Western Digital 80gb PATA
Hard drive 4: Seagate 200gb SATA
Hard drive 5: Seagate 400gb SATA
Hard drive 6 & 7 in RAID 0: 2x Seagate 320gb SATA
2x 120mm fans
2x 80mm fans

Sure, I don't doubt there is any number of combinations of my hardware in Australia, but the number of combinations is huge, to control this will be a massive undertaking, and as I see it, any attempt to remove the control I have over the hardware in my computer in this regard is an attempt at my freedom as this is something I love being able to do exactly what I want with, when money permits of course, which it hasn't for a while now as much of the hardware would show.

I think this is a very extreme measure and doubt it would come to that but I suppose with some of the inaccurate "proof" I've seen for power consumption for the plasma's and LCD's (for another article), I expect there could be just as much of this around for cutting back computer power consumption, so I suppose one can only hope it doesn't get too bad.

Labels: hardware, politics, rants, technology

I was just having a read through a news article on the Sydney Morning Herald regarding Kevin Rudd's new education plans and am I the only one that finds "...the Government's plan to provide computers to every high school student..." a complete waste of my taxes? I knew about this before Labour were elected, yes, and this was one of the many things I counted against them.

I just went and had a look at the details on the official Australian Labour Party Website at an article from November 14th titled "Federal Labor's Education Revolution - A School Computer For Every Student In Years 9-12"

So reading through this, that's all well and good, but "A Rudd Labor Government will invest $1 billion over four years to turn every secondary school in Australia into a digital school." And, "The National Secondary School Computer Fund will allow secondary schools to apply for capital grants of up to $1 million to acquire new or upgrade information technology equipment."

That's a lot of taxpayer money, but here's what I don't understand about it, every student has access to computers anyway, why do they all need their own, and if they do, why shouldn't they have to work for it like every other person in the country? Sure, I have my own computer, I have my own laptop as well. Actually, if we want to get into specifics, I'll be completely upgrading my desktop in a few weeks time at which point I will have two quite powerful computers, along with my Macbook Pro, and my old laptop which is still decent, despite its generally dieing. And hey, you know what, I'm a university student that doesn't live at home. I have to pay all my own bills, rent, phone, internet, power, car, etc and aside from my HECS, I get no government assistance at all. I get no money from Centrelink, no rent assistance, no free computer gear, I have to work for it all and pay FULL taxes at the same time.

So here is the biggest thing, yes, my university has better computer facilities than most school's, but the fact is, the vast majority of school's already provide adequate computer access for students, along with internet access. As it was, at one of my schools, albeit a private school, they had almost as many computers as they did students, and it was a small school, I'm talking 50 students. My other school, a public school, had at least 5 computer labs that I know of, for all I know there could have been more as I kept finding them all over the place as well as the library which had a computer section with 40 or so computers in it. Additionally, they had laptops and projectors that were loaned out to students for use in classes if they needed them for whatever reason. As I said, this was at a PUBLIC school.

I am sure the grant would be great for schools to upgrade labs and so on, but in my experience, most schools already have systems in place for this sort of thing. The public school I mentioned had a 3 year rotation in the 3 main labs and library. One lab would be upgraded each year and any extra money in the budget meant one of the other smaller labs would be upgraded as well. Every 3rd year the library would be upgraded along with one of the labs.

So yes, the grant would no doubt be helpful in that way as it would allow a bigger budget, but for a lot of schools, my question is, is it really needed? And as far as buying students their own computers, I have to pay and always have had to pay for all of my own equipment and I don't see how it is fair at all that I should have to pay for other peoples gear. I personally think something like this should be restricted to the school only, even having enough computers for one per student located at the school is a waste of money. They aren't all going to be used all at once and I believe it will be a long time before they ever will be, if they ever will be. They can be used for most things yes, but for food tech, visual arts, music, drama, industrial arts, any of the creative and performing arts subjects cannot be completely reliant on computers, they can only partially be computer oriented and I'm sure there are more subjects as well that fit this bill.

The money would be better spent actually upgrading school facilities, such as air conditioning in more classes, and better lab equipment and so on.

Please note, this is just my perspective on it all and I am sure it will benefit someone somewhere, I just don't believe it is a worthwhile use of my and every other taxpayers money.

Labels: politics, rants

Labels: rants, special interest

Having just spent 2 hours at the cinema watching 30 Days of Night, I feel that I would like my $7 back.

I am glad I get a student discount cause I would be really annoyed if I had spent the full $14.50 on a ticket only to find out how much of a let down it was.

30 Days of Night is a movie about an Alaskan town (don't ask me which exactly as it was not something that was emphasised in the movie) that has a month of darkness.

During this month though, something unusual happens and vampires visit the town and kill almost everyone bar a few survivors. In the end, our hero, Eban, the sheriff, turns himself into a vampire in order to be able to fight the vampires, and then dies in the sunlight as the sun comes back on the morning of the 31st day.

The story itself was not that bad, but what could have been quite a good plot was ruined by an overly beastial portrayal of the vampires, despite their being able to speak a language that seemed quite cool.

I think they would have been better portrayed with a degree of class such as in Underworld, or even Blade.

I had quite a few quibbles with 30 Days of Night in regards to some of the story points.

The first was that when Stella was in an accident just before the darkness came, she commented that her car was totaled, but apart from the tractor being half on top of it, it looked completely undamaged, no visible damage around the tractor or anything.

The second was later, when they were hiding in the attic of one of the houses, they had a lamp on, and they were watching the outside through a torn flap in the roof. Now maybe it's just me, but if it's dark, and there is any gap at all in the attic roof, the light will show through to the outside, and if there is a gap as big as the flap they were looking out, it would be quite visible. Yet the vampires never found them in the attic, despite the fact that they were wandering the roof tops, so many of them would have been eye level with the emitted light.

The third was, it took over a week for there to be a blizzard so they could use it as cover to move outside, and it only lasted for a duration of about 2 minutes in the movie, I would estimate in what they achieved in those 2 minutes that it may have been more like 5-10 minutes if it were real. I'm no expert on it, but surely in that area there would be blizzards, or at least heavy winter storms a bit more frequently than that, and for longer. I know that when we have summer storm weather, we get one almost every day for a week or 2. Not the same I know, but I expect it would be similar. They did mention that it was a whiteout once or twice, which would make sense to be less frequent, but I still don't think it really worked that great in that regard.

There was one or two other things that really annoyed me about it, but it would seem I have since forgotten due to paying less and less attention to it.

No doubt there are people who thought a lot more of it than I did, after all, IMDB's user rating's put it at 7.1/10 at the time of writing this, but I thought it could definitely be better.

Labels: movies, rants

This weekend just passed I have been away on holidays visiting my family for what was meant to be a relaxing weekend at the end of a very hectic week. It didn't end up being relaxing, but I suppose it was restful, in a way.

One of my old school's, Blue Hills College had gotten the contract to distribute Castle and Chrisco Hampers for this area, and had asked for volunteer's so that it could be done as a fundraiser for the school. From what I can gather, it sounds like it will be a pretty decent fundraiser as there is meant to be some $A25,000 raised over the next month.

My parents and sister had volunteered to help out on Sunday so I thought I might as well go along and help out as well.

I honestly never realised just how many people bought things through Chrisco and other things like this, they always seemed too expensive to me. At the warehouse though, we had two refrigerated containers full of frozen hampers, and two refrigerated truck trailers full waiting to be transferred to the containers as the ones from the containers are delivered. That's just for 4 days worth of deliveries! Not to mention the things that were already out of the containers waiting to be loaded into delivery trucks, and this is not a big area! I can only imagine how much must go out in the cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne!

I ended up going out in one of the truck's on a delivery run, I think we went to 16 different places on the run, it just amazed me how many of them the parents were abusive and yelled at the children like they were yelling at dogs.

Of the 16, one there was no one at home, three were retired couples, and of the other 12, they all had kids, and there were only 3, possibly 4 that didn't yell at the kids. Some of them you would see one minute yell at the kids, then the next at the dogs, and there would be no change at all in the way they yelled at either of them. I was just astounded that 2 thirds of the families we delivered to had so much verbal abuse as commonplace. I mean, a lot of these places I delivered pizza to as well when I was working at Domino's, but I had never seen this before. I still find it hard to believe just how much of it is happening.

Labels: rants

One of the most annoying thing's I have ever come across in my web design experience, is when working on a website with another designer, they are adding formatting, either in HTML or using inline styles, in the HTML file instead of in the CSS file. This is extremely frustrating when I try and do things using the external style sheet and I find I don't have the control over them that I should have, and this is frustration is compounded, when I know that I wrote the style that should do it myself and all of a sudden, it's not there anymore and I have to go hunting through the HTML looking for whatever snippet of code he has added or taken out of the style sheet.

Of course to make things even more difficult, he has added it in multiple HTML documents so I have to go through 30 odd files and remove or modify this tag to do whatever I needed.

His reasoning is that this makes the code easier to manage, but I really don't see it, it just seems to create more work from where I'm sitting.

So the only way I can see that this can be even worse, is that he is my boss so I can hardly complain about his coding practice, despite how illogical his reasoning is.

If there is one thing I can't stress enough to people, it is to write your code to the World Wide Web Consortium's standards. Standards compliant code is NOT hard to write, especially if you just use one of the Transitional standards. There's a whole stack of free information and tutorials on it at the W3 Schools website too.

Learn it, do it.

Perhaps I'm the only one that finds this annoying, but as good as PHP is, it seems to me that he is using if excessively and all he is really managing to do is slow the loading time down.

For example, we have had a problem with 100% heights specified in the style sheet where all browsers read that correctly, except for Internet Explorer which didn't read it at all, so the height has to be manually specified for it. I figured out that if you specify the height in the HTML it works in Internet Explorer, so we just have to manually specify the height for each page (yay). So he is using PHP to write an if else statement in the HTML document that says if the browser is Internet Explorer, make the height this much, else make it 100%.

This is completely unnecessary though as all the other browsers ignore the height="" tag anyway and use the height specified in the style sheet. You can set the height to 10 in the HTML and the other browsers will still do it as 100%, as they should. So really, this PHP statement is a waste of his time, my time, the server's CPU time, and ultimately, the user's loading time.

This particular statement is not big I know and should still be executed quite fast, but there are statements like this all over the place that just waste time, and time always adds up.

Labels: code, internet, rants, special interest

John Williamson is a great guy, don't get me wrong, I like his songs (unusual for me, I know), he portrays the Aussie way so well, but you can only here the same albumof his so many times.

My boss has had one album of his playing at work for the past 2 weeks. The same album, over and over. It has some great songs on it,but you can only hear it so many times without starting to go slightly crazy.

Even if it was rotating with a couple of other CD's it would be fine, but in a 5 hour shift, you hear the same songs at least 5 times! That's a little much if you ask me. Especially after an ITB006 (Networking) exam at 8:30 this morning!

The exam went pretty well I think, there were a few things I couldn't remember, like how to do the working on a cyclic redundancy check, and a couple of other questions that I no longer remember, but aside from that it was pretty good.

Again it surprised me how much of it was exactly the same as from the two practice exams, but hey, who's complaining right? Even better, there was nothing from the practical tutorials, it was completely based on the lectures and the theory from tutorial's. Which is particularly good since I didn't actually go to all of the practicals.

I followed most of the lecture material fairly well so I didn't think the question's based on them were very hard, and 30 of them were multiple choice anyway, with the other 5 being short answer questions split into 3-5 questions each.

The most any individual question was worth from memory was 4 marks, with 1 and 2 each being the average marks per question so I think it should be a pretty easy exam to do well in.

I also donated blood after the exam. It's the first time since I moved up to Brisbane that I've been able to donate when I've been near one of the blood banks or the mobile donor centre's. Every other time, I've had to be somewhere in the next 5 minutes or so, or I've been sick or had a headache or something like that. I almost walked past it this time without thinking but they had a big sign up saying they particularly need O blood types at the moment, so since I'm an O positive that caught my eye and lo and behold they took my blood. Filled a bag in 12 minutes, that's a personal best!

Now everyone that's able, go donate blood! It's good, I promise. It doesn't hurt much at all and whatever pain you do get usually goes away within a few minutes anyway, so do it!

Labels: music, rants, university, work

I don't get it. What is with people? EVERY resume that we have gotten today has had spelling errors, or grammatical errors, or just doesn't show anything useful. There is one, it's two pages long and looks fancy and fairly professional, but the information provided is exactly like the one I posted yesterday! It conveys absolutely nothing useful at all!

There is another, the prospective interviewee has written their resume in Seek and has just linked us to their Seek resume page rather than taking the time to bother doing up a professional looking one himself. His content is reasonable, and I will admit it does look fairly professional, but then you start to read it, and there are lower case headings, comma's at the end of sentences and so on. It would be nice to get a decent looking resume for once. I thought this job of knocking back people would be hard since I don't like to hurt peoples feelings or anything, but some of these resume's make it pretty easy, he hasn't even capitalized the first letters of his first and last name!

On an interesting and slightly less...annoying...note, one in three of the applicants live within a five minute walk of my place.

Labels: rants, work

At work at the moment we are looking for more staff and there are job advertisements on places like Seek, University of Queensland Student Union Employment, Queensland University of Technology Student Guild Employment and so on. Now there have been a lot of resume's come through and since I do most of the email work, I have the job of going over each resume and deciding which one's are worth printing and forwarding to my boss, and which ones will get a lovely little email in response that reads:

"Dear Jeremy,

Thankyou very much for your application, however at this stage all of the interview places have been filled. Should any of these fall through, we will be in contact again.

Best regards,

Management"

Isn't that nice?

Anyway, here I am going through these resume's, and only a couple of them I would even consider interviewing, but the majority met my boss's criteria, so theres 8 or so got printed out and forwarded onto her. Then there was this one:

Name: Billy K

Address: 85 Bad St

Phone: 0400 000 000

Email Address: billy.k1989@hotmail.com

Drivers Licence: No

Personal Qualities: Friendly, Fun, keen, patient

Interest & Hobbies: Hanging out with friends, going to

movies, talking to peple

Schooling: ********** State High School 1998

Objective: To get a job to save some money and get

Work experience

Availability: Casual

References: Will give when you call.

Of course, this isn't the actual resume, but this is exactly how it was formatted and the exact same way it was written, spelling mistakes, poor grammar, some things not formatted the same as the rest, and so on.

Now, I'm not the employer, but just reading that, why would I want to work with them? So why would an employer want to consider employing them? The resume doesn't even take up a page.

So apart from that, what's wrong with it? Where have they worked before? There's no employment history, there aren't even any references, he says he will only supply them on request, so how do we know anything about him prior to speaking to him? He hasn't even given his last name, just an initial!

Additionally, he only has one school listed, which he left in 1998, so either he is in his late 20's (which is fine), or he dropped out of school. Either way he's been out of school for 9 years and doesn't have an employment history, has he even worked at all in that time? He hasn't said he's doing anything else at the moment, such as tertiary education, nor does he have a drivers license, so how do we know he's even motivated to do anything but the absolute minimum?

His interests are fine, but they show nothing and are basically wasted space. Everything likes those things. They don't stand out. So again this works against him as it builds on what I said before, it shows he isn't motivated. In addition to this he doesn't have any skills listed aside from his "Personal qualities", so how do we know what he can do?

Even his "Objective" is shocking. It confirms our belief that he most likely has not had a job before, despite being out of school for almost 10 years and that he isn't motivated!

This in turn leads us to wonder if he is even being honest in his "Personal qualities" as he clearly is not "keen", not about working anyway.

So please, someone tell me, why oh why would someone want to employ him?

It leads one to wonder about the effectiveness of Centrelink and their job diaries. People have to apply for jobs to keep getting paid by Centrelink, of course they don't have to get one...

I cannot stand these people who seem to think they shouldn't have to work and should get everything for free.

Seriously, this place is so easy to get a job if you show any interest or initiative at all, I mean, its a surf shop, I'm not even interested in surfing or anything surfing related, yet I got a job here!

Labels: politics, rants, work

From - Microsoft Clipart

Why does it not surprise me in the slightest, that despite the fact that a study has proven that P2P music downloading actually has increased CD sales in Canada as quoted below, the Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) swears black and blue that this could not possibly be relevant in Australia?

"...our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing. We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year."

According to a telephone survey conducted in Australia, apparently it has the opposite effect, and of course logically, if people are getting music for free, then why would they download it, right?

I disagree with this. I am inclined to believe that the Canadian study is correct, and relevant in Australia. I mean seriously, who is going to go out and buy CD's of a band they have never heard of? Thats no sales for that band from thousands of prospective listeners. However, if someone downloads some of their songs because they were recommended by someone, or even just because they were curious to see what they sound like, if they like what they hear, they are far more likely to go buy an album.

The same study found that there was no clear relation between legal and illegal music downloading, but according to some figures shown as part of an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, legal download sales have increased!

"Sales figures for the first six months of the year, releas