danny’s space

Thought 5: HP devices are getting cooler and cooler. HP multifunction printer/scanner/copier/faxes are totally cool. They even come with free ink (well, to be expected since you can’t really print anything without it), free photo paper, a cool resealable photo paper storage bag (which I think is the best bit), etc etc. The installation went smoothly, even a banana could set it up. Included HP software looks pretty useful on first glance. Plus $100 cash back, what a deal. The black print speed is super quick. Only gripe so far is that the new Vivera inks from HP are a bit strange - there are 5 little separate colour cartridges (cyan, dark cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, or something like that) that look like they’ve only got enough ink for 2 decent photos. They must be expensive as well. Damn.

Thought 6: What’s with people and turning right? On Yanko Road a stupid van driver took a bigger risk than the police car earlier today, turning right from a side street onto Yanko Road when I was probably only 10 metres away going at 60. Of course, I honked him (twice actually). I like honking. There’s something about public humiliation and helping people to become better drivers.

Thought 7: Finally finished building a shelf-like thing for storage of large boxes other things like that (see picture). Unfortunately the thing isn’t exactly that well built, and it still sways a bit, but hopefully it’ll withstand semi heavy stuff. Hmm, actually, I worry… The thing was too big to assemble and then carry into the room, so I had to build the frame in 3 parts, lug it into the room, and then assemble it with the shelf boards. It’s 2.4m high and 1.8m wide, quite a monster. Needless to say everything smells like sawdust now, and there’s plenty of it all over the ground.

Thought 8: For those who leave their computers on all the time and don’t use it for much demanding stuff, visit World Community Grid and lend your processor time to science! This is another one of those distributed computing things where normal run-of-the-mill desktop computers in peoples’ homes are used to do big-time research by combining the power of thousands computers around the world. This particular one is non-profit and researches things like anti-HIV drugs and protein folding.

here come a string of random comments/thoughts whose only connection is that i have something to do with them.. how i pity them..

Thought 1: I think I’ll start typing in proper case in blogs, since most other blogs I visit do this. It seems to be easier to read but not easier to type.

Thought 2: For those who want to watch Saw II, unless you like lots of blood and torture scenes and general sadistic things then it’s not for you. There are good plot twists and red herrings as you would expect from Saw, but apart from that it’s more gruesome than the original, especially since there are more people involved and they’re let loose, so to speak, in a whole house instead of just a room. Definitely not one for the squeamish.

Thought 3: Aren’t police subject to common sense on the road as well? Mum and I were driving back from North Sydney on Epping Road earlier today, and we were approaching this intersection without traffic lights, but with a right turn bay coming from the opposite direction on Epping Road. So we’re bearing down on the intersection at the legal speed and the police car, the next car in the turning bay to turn, decides to turn with an unsafe distance between our car and the intersection. I wonder what would happen if we didn’t brake and had hit the car.

Thought 4: I wonder if you could scam money back promotions. Say a company, let’s call them HP, offer a $100 cashback scheme for an item, let’s say a multifunction printer. If one was to buy 10 multifunctions for say $500 each, and then apply for the cashback, and then return the items to the store (being none the wiser to the customer’s cashback dealings), would this mean the customer is net $1000 richer?

Update to Thought 4: Ah nuts, it seems HP is pretty smart. They ask that you send in the physical barcode and serial number cut out from the cardboard box within which the multifunction is contained. Nuts.

More thoughts later when I can think of them.

ah, addictinggames.com comes to the rescue again..

this is a game for all those button mashers out there and for those who are procrastinating.. visit King of Buttons! do the ‘time attack’ minigame and you have 25 seconds to click a button as many times as you can.. the lactic acid really builds up, but i guess it’s only 25 seconds.. this is definitely one for chap..

try it and see how you go! unfortunately the high scores don’t seem to work for me so i can’t see how i compare to others.. oh well.. pretty sad i know..

and my holidays have only been running for 2 days..

i’m getting lazy about many things.. not bothering to reply emails for a few days (which says nothing about the recipient just the sender’s (my own) holiday-induced laziness).. general lethargy.. maybe the ’stress’ of the semester is finally catching up to me.. who knows..

been taking jaz for walks for the past 2 days.. wait, 3.. something like that.. my sister and i took jaz for a walk yesterday but she wasn’t satisfied/tired enough from one lap around the block so after she got to the gate of our house, she stuck her nose in briefly and then decided to keep walking, so i was dragged along for another half lap but successfully navigated (*gasp*) a shortcut that took us back home before both of us had heart attacks.. one of the houses in a neighbouring street had their front fence blown over by the recent winds (i assume) so the owner and his dog were in the front yard doing something.. this dog was a scary german shepherd who, every time jaz walked past (we walked past a few times since jaz was insatiable), would come bounding across the road and start snarling and barking at us.. needless to say jaz was scared but still wanted to play with the german shepherd whose idea of play obviously meant putting as many tooth-shaped holes into a friend as possible..

today we went for a walk around the entire block which took a good 45 minutes (or something, i was too tired to notice the time).. at least the weather wasn’t that hot though.. every time we go around a particular bend on wallalong cresent, i get reminded of the taxi incident.. scary stuff.. i think jaz is getting used to the smells of the roads around our house though because she doesn’t stop to sniff things as much on our usual route - only when we take her on an extended walk does she stop and start.. plus i’ve realised that everyone’s dog is better trained than jaz.. there was this black labrador (i think) who bounded towards jaz on our extended walk today, and after having a friendly sniff or three, was quickly recalled by its owner and actually listened! same with that scary german shepherd actually..

but i guess these incidents are also an indication of the number of retarded owners who don’t properly restrain their dogs and allow them to run after every four legged furry animal that waltzes past their house.. i mean, come on.. i would like to walk jaz without fear of being mauled by a german shepherd or sniffed by an overly excited black labrador..

anyway, today we finally got nash’s presents together and surpried him at his place.. too bad the poor guy has a biochemistry exam tomorrow! we got him a sri lankan jersey with his surname and ‘21′ printed on the back, which he was absolutely stoked about.. and also two stargate boxsets and a stargate keyring.. pretty cool! his two most favourite things.. so now between nash, becky and myself we have most of the 9 seasons of stargate on dvd, just missing a few of the earlier seasons.. but we’ll work on that! and have a week-long stargate fest sometime.. 120hrs of non-stop watching will probably get all of that seen.. well, ’seen’.. but yes, we had a good bludge at chap’s house as well, playing starcraft and foosball.. quite geeky, maybe this should be categorised under g33k stuff.. but it was lots of fun, chap and i laughed too hard (again) about stargate and baz’s balls of death..

why are my blogs so freaking long.. congratulations if you’ve read down to here and have not been placed in a coma.. speaking of comas, i need to go watch house i taped yesterday.. plus what’s with stupid channel 10 advertising next week’s episode as the last episode of the season? it so isn’t!! it’s like (i think at least..) the 5th episode of the 2nd season or something.. just because stupid australian tv channels show it as the last episode in a string of episodes doesn’t make it the ‘must-see shocking final episode of house’.. far out..

wooooooo

no more dodgy undergrad lectures forever! (well, provided everything goes well with the exam marking and they don’t lose my paper…) (and well, except the coursework that we have to do for honours…) so what am i celebrating for anyway.. there’s still alot more uni to go.. but at least the honours and probably phd coming up is more research focussed with emphasis on doing what i want to do instead of getting useless information rammed down my throat..

so anyway it’s the holidays now.. good luck to all those poor UNSW folk who are mostly yet to start their exams! remember to write your chinese name and student ID on the cover of your exam paper, and sit according to your chinese zodiac and position your drink bottle and eraser at the optimal north-facing feng shui position.. also remember that from the mid 1990’s, UNSW has listed your seat numbers according to your chinese name.. if you do not have a chinese name, you can always talk to the person next to you - chances are they are asian, and chances are they will only speak cantonese, in which case you can just write down the first three words they say and use these as your new chinese name..

i guess nothing overly exciting has happened over the last few weeks.. stuvac is, well, stuvac.. nothing but sitting at home eating and studying and sleeping and watching a fair amount of tv.. the way i like to study is to type up notes, and once all the notes are typed up for a particular exam, to stand in front of a whiteboard and write down stuff, take a break, wipe out some stuff, take a break, fill in the wiped out stuff, take a break, and repeat.. it works well, especially the breaks.. i think they help me remember.. really! oh and drinking plenty of fluids (OJ, coke, water) helps, plus lots of sleep - it helps your brain remember stuff..

so i guess nothing much is going to happen until everyone else finishes.. which will be in a few weeks time thanks to University of Hong Kong, Australia Campus (aka UNSW) running their semester using the lunar calendar.. just plenty of bludge at home i think.. and trying to lose all this fat i put on during stuvac.. which probably means walking the crazy labrador again every day, although it’s getting hot so every time we come back from walks she looks and sounds like she’s going to have a heart attack even though she only just turned 1..

so good luck all who still have exams, especially for those who are in their final semester of uni!

ahh, meals with the church bunch are always such fun..

last night thanks to a last minute organisational effort from sara, a few of the church bunch (amy, chap, cheuk, chris, karen, sara, myself) went to the korean bbq place at eastwood for a nice dinner with gelato afterwards at lello’s in macquarie

needless to say, dinner was a blast.. apart from the smell of the place which is unavoidable, lots of loud talking and hysterical laughter came from our table to the dismay of the restaurant owners and other diners.. interesting moments include chap crying over baz’s balls of rage and the endless hole-digging mostly by the two couples that were there..

comprehensive coverage can be found at chap’s blog or amy’s blog.. no need to double up..

i think we were making way too much noise.. the restaurant people had interesting ways of kicking us out.. when they had noticed that we weren’t eating anymore but still making noise, a waiter promptly sidled up behind our table and said ‘yes?’ as if we had called him over.. so we had to ask for the bill.. which of course we took ages to pay.. so long that they eventually turned music on to try to drown out our laughter.. so we got the hint and left them in peace..

then outside, after dinner (a more appropriate time), mention was made of a recent smh article about a guy who had his butt cheeks glued together and his nether regions glued to his abdomen by an ex-girlfriend.. and chap (who hadn’t heard this story before last night) and i stood keeled over in laughter outside eastwood hotel.. not one of the best places to be seen..

then came gelato at macquarie at which point cheuky and karen sadly had to leave.. chap and amy were 10 minutes late because apparently they had ‘parked their car very far away’ and had to walk from the restaurant.. right.. gelato was less loud than korean.. rocher flavour is so good, but only in small amounts - it tastes like an ice-cream version of the inside of a ferrero rocher (well, duh) but gets revolting after too much.. taro is great though.. but yes, more sad jokes between amy, chap, chris, sara and i..

so fun! haven’t laughed that hard for a while.. had to reach for my lifesaving puffer as well..

and then today in the morning for petra we had a great session on writing up our testimonies.. phil’s plan for writing out testimonies was very useful, got all the ‘necessary’ things in, in a logical order.. we were meant to watch a dvd with testimonies but alas it was never meant to be.. and then for service we continued going through 1 thes, doing the first part of chapter 5 today about how Jesus will return at unknown hour, and that the final judgement when he does will be unexpected and inescapable.. again reiterating the real need for our not-yet-Christian family and friends to know God’s grace..

and then we had lunch at macquarie after church.. that was also less loud than korean.. i think nothing can compare to the loudness of saturday night haha.. again (poor) chap was the subject of a bit of bagging out.. especially about his muscles and semi see-through t-shirt.. after which he stormed off and didn’t return for a while.. but when he did he was holding a box of wicked wings so i guess that explains the lengthy delay..

so these last few days have been pretty good.. again i’ve been giving myself a long break from studying after finishing a main set of notes for micro.. my gosh some lecturers suck so bad, naming no names until i graduate of course.. i guess it’s back to cramming tonight or tomorrow.. maybe tomorrow.. starcraft or half-life 2 tonight..

i snorted some rice earlier tonight as well.. eating too fast.. tomato fried rice with prawn bits is soooo good! now i’m paying for it by having a grain of rice lodged in my nasal cavity.. oh yay..

if it ain’t broke, don’t update it..

i think this mantra applies to software updates, unless you are masochistic of course.. a few weeks ago i updated adobe acrobat 6 (the full version, not the reader) because the software kept bugging me to update.. so i eventually succumbed to pressure (rather, annoyance) and updated the software.. updating wasn’t such a big deal but what came later was..

suddenly, every time acrobat started up, that annoying windows installer window would pop and and try tl ‘update’ and ‘install’ acrobat.. what gives? i just press cancel and it doesn’t seem to affect acrobat’s operation much..

until today.. i started word up after many weeks of using it to type notes without any troubles.. and today when i start it up, it shoots an error message saying ‘compile error in hidden module: autoexec’.. so automatically i panic because i think it’s some crap vba virus, what with the hidden module and all that.. and so i google it.. lo and behold, it’s a damn acrobat problem.. micro$oft has written a nice knowledge base article about it..

so i remove the pdfmaker.dot and pdkmaker.xla files (renaming them to *.old) from the office startup directories, and everything works again.. hmm.. well, everything except for the pdf maker buttons that acrobat embedded into word and excel that were totally useless anyway since printing straight to the acrobat pdf printer was much quicker..

stupid software..

as i read somewhere a few days ago.. if every tuesday we tied our shoelaces the normal way and our shoes exploded someone would say something.. but this happens all the time with computers and no one seems to mind..

i’ve recently (well, over the last month or so) been on a backup spree - i swear it’s so fun, backing up important data and whatnot..

a reminder about the importance of backups came when the hard disk in the computer in the lab i work in crashed.. luckily most of us kept second copies of our work on other computers, but one guy in the lab lost most of his recent work because he had forgotten to back up.. so we had to ship the computer to a data recovery service, and the price was pretty steep - ~$1500 to recover only 6 DVDs worth of data from the dodged hard disk..

so the moral of the story? keep regular backups.. invest in a DVD burner (i recommend the pioneer range) and buy a couple of DVD+RWs and back up those files! photos and stuff i like backing up onto DVD+Rs because it’s not like they’re going to change.. also Rs keep for longer anyway.. it’s also useful (i read somewhere, smh i think..) to make 2 backups and give a copy to a friend who doesn’t live in the same house as you - call this paranoid, but better safe than sorry..

so, go forth and back up!

i woke up today to find out that the thermaltake cpu cooler i had ordered from mittoni a few days ago had arrived by courier.. it was the ‘silenttower‘, and it lives up to its name - it was a tower indeed! (see picture - the big blue thing is the silenttower) i was afraid it wouldn’t fit into the computer case because it projected so far from the motherboard - i think a gap of only a few centimeters exists now between the case and the top of the cpu cooler..

anyway, installation was pretty straightforward although quite involved.. had to pull the motherboard out of the computer, remove the stock intel fan, clean up the mess that the intel thermal compound left behind, and then install the new fan using nice new micronised silver thermal compound from arctic silver..

and then obviously i had to take it for a test run.. the computer switched on without too much of a hiccup, apart from windows not liking usb devices plugged into different sockets coming out of hibernation.. apart from that, this thermaltake cpu cooler lived up to the other part of its name - silent! it’s a far cry compared to the dodgy intel stock cooler..

anyway, on stress tests with video encoding and also, of course, playing half-life 2, the cooler performed fantastically.. on a warm day like today, the temperature stayed under 50 degrees with only a whisper of sound coming from the cooler - compared to the blaring motorbike noise that the intel cooler used to make.. supposedly cooling performance will improve once the silver thermal compound properly melts in or something - it’ll be even cooler then! (in more ways than one)

okay anyway, i have a headache now from playing half-life 2 to ‘test’ out the new cooler.. so there goes my productivity for the day.. maybe i should have installed it at night.. oh well..

all up the cooler plus thermal compound plus delivery was only $61 - a small price to pay for great cooling performance and the ability to actually hear yourself think when using the computer.. i know next time i build a computer i’ll be looking to put one of these after market coolers in instead of the crappy intel one..