Thunderbirds are go!

I’ll blag this now while I remember it. I was in the newsagency yesterday, looking at cards. I saw this one with Lady Penelope and Parker (from the Thunderbirds, of course!). I thought it was pretty cool, but couldn’t figure out a use for it (especially because nobody I know except Dad and a few cousins actually know the Thunderbirds to any great extent). Anyway, this guy and his girlfriend/wife/whatever came up next to me and the guy picked it out, and showed it to the woman next to him, saying “Have an FAB engagement!”. I almost burst out laughing there and then! Here I was, trying to figure out what on earth I could use such a card for, and he’s walked straight up to it and come up with the best punch line ever! I shall have to use it one day, I think. Just gotta find somebody whom will actually get it…

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter to all, and to all, a good… chocolate feast! Actually, I haven’t eaten any chocolate yet today! I got a bit, but yeah… Don’t particularly feel like it at this point in time. My Easter has actually been pretty cool so far though. Last night I put chocolate bunnies in front of everyone’s doors (including mine!), as a nice little surprise. This morning when I got up, the bunny had procreated, and there was an egg next to it! Then when I got out of the shower, a small box of stuff had appeared! It was pretty surprising, actually! . Everyone seems to not be here though, so I can’t work out who put what where and when. I’m sure I will find out soon enough though! Oh, there are also some small eggs in a bowl on the kitchen table. Hehe, goes to show how much all my flatmates get along. It’s not every day that random people buy chocolate for each other! .

Anyway, Happy Easter!

- James

Traffic

Today is one of those days where I am glad that:

a) I don’t have a car

b) I live close to the shopping centre

I was walking home from doing the shopping, and there were police directing traffic around Broadway shopping centre because the carpark is full. Traffic was banked up like crazy – so much so that I can look out my window onto Mountain St and see the traffic jam! It comes back almost to here. Ergh…

Gah, noise

There is a jack hammer working across the street. See title.

Fire!!

This morning I was woken up by a fire drill in my building. Very loud, very annoying. Quickly got out of bed, got dressed, ventured out into the living room to find Rob and Jack in a similar position to me. Noise was even louder out there. Went downstairs (lift shut off… damn) and outside to the assembly area. The guy who set it off said just to wait a couple of minutes until everyone was out, then we could go back in. ‘Everyone’ turned out to be 30-40 people, out of the couple of hundred who live there. Admittedly, most were probably at uni or work, but there were definitely still inside (we were told there would be a fire drill in the next few days). But yeah, we could go back inside pretty soon. No roll call that takes an hour like at school. Overall, not too bad an experience, except for the noise. Definitely better than school…

Also, I just checked my bank balance online. Biggest shock ever. Well, when it comes to seeing my bank balance anyway. Apparently work is now paying me on a random basis. I thought it was once a month, but yesterday they gave paid me for the last two and a half weeks. Strange, but it’s nice to have the extra money there. I was a bit worried about the once-a-month thing. Hard to budget with. Still, will random payments be any easier? Well… as long as they are relatively frequent, it doesn’t bother me. Oh, I just remembered… I keep thinking I have work tomorrow, but I don’t due to Good Friday. I hope I don’t accidentally get up early…

Microsoft Musings

I meant to mention this a while ago, but… forgot. It seems that Microsoft Office 2007 is not compatible with Windows Vista. Or vice-versa. See, my boss at work got a brand new Sony notebook with Vista installed on it. He installed Office 2007 on it, and what happens? It blue-screens the hell out of everything! And by that, I mean he kept getting the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) every time he booted up his machine. We at first thought it must be his fingerprint reader or something, but apparently not! His notebook has already been replaced a couple of times, too, due to most the same problem I think. Weird eh… That, and darned FUNNY! Silly Microsoft… they should know better than to make their brand new office suite incompatible with their brand new operating system.

In other news… Um… I’ve been pretty busy, I guess. I spent most of last night and today doing my assignment for Introduction to Information Systems, which was due tonight. It was okay though… Everyone got their bits done on time, and I thought we actually put something pretty cool together. Now we just have to wait until marks come back to find out whether my hopes are justified!

I’ve also been dwelling over something I very recently found out. I won’t go into any details, but it was quite a shock to say the least! All is good though .

Well, that’s about it for now! Much shorter blog than last time. Not that that is hard. Bye!

First blag on new site!

Woo first post written on my new blog!! How exciting! Sorry it’s been a while, I’ve been busy with stuff and trying to get everything set up. Getting there!

Today I finally got sick of my wireless card for my notebook (a Belkin F5D7010). Every time I did ANYTHING to my notebook I would have to find a wired Internet connection (not really a problem at home, but awful here), then download and install a program called ndiswrapper, then install the drivers for my card, and it would *hopefully* work. Last night I installed the beta of Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), which I will talk about later, and ndiswrapper stopped working. What a surprise! The damned thing being, ndiswrapper doesn’t seem to work properly in Feisty yet. So even though I can get a wired Internet connection in Errol’s room, I couldn’t get my wireless to work anyway. That was last night. This morning I got pissed off and went to Harvey Norman to get a new one. Yes, I know I could’ve got one a helluva lot cheaper if I shopped around a bit, but I just wanted one that worked, and one that worked NOW.

The guy in Harvey Norman was great, actually. I said I needed one that worked with Linux, and he told me not to get a D-Link, as they are very Windows orientated. Same with Belkin. He suggested Linksys, as they are made by Cisco, and since Cisco are very Linux orientated, that would be my best bet. It sounded like a good theory, so I went ahead and bought it! The guy was actually rather interested in Linux and stuff, which was cool. He bagged out Windows a little bit, and said that he had tried Gentoo or something, but couldn’t get his display working. I suggested Ubuntu, of course!

Anyway, got my new card home, plugged it in, and got an initial rush of joy because the power light on the card turned on! I knew when my old card wasn’t working when the light didn’t turn on. However, it turned out to be a bit pre-emptive, as I still couldn’t get hold of a wireless connection. Okay, so no drivers for my card built into the Linux kernel. Not the end of the world, necessarily. So, plugged into the wired Internet in Errol’s room again, looked up the Linksys website. No help there. Next came my fix-everything solution – the Ubuntu Forums! And what little gem do I find? A wonderful HOW-TO on how to set up my wireless card! And no horrible ndiswrapper! I just had to download a little DEB package, install it, and wow, it works! This means that I can just keep a copy of the DEB package somewhere than won’t get deleted every time I make significant changes (such as my /home directory, or my external HDD), so I won’t need a wired Internet connection to get started! Yay!! My dreams come true!

Oh yeah, I also bought a nice backpack from Harvey Norman. I have another laptop backpack, but it is so massive that I feel like I am going hiking somewhere whenever I put it on. So now that I have a new backpack and a new wireless card, I think I will do some selling on eBay, as I do not need two of each! And both work perfectly fine, they just do not suit my needs.

Now, my impressions of Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn. Obviously it’s a beta version – still 3 weeks till release date (in which time there will be a significant amount of changes. Ubuntu releases a new version approximately every 6 months. None of this 6 year bullshit like Microsoft!), so there are still some bugs, etc. Like ndiswrapper… not that anybody should need that anyway. But overall, it seems extremely stable! Not a HEAP different to Edgy, the previous version, but a lot of nice little things. Like the look is slightly different (I LOVE the boot splash and login screen!). And network-manager seems to work a little better to! On Edgy, it wouldn’t tell me how strong each connection was, but it actually uses the little bard in Feisty! It also has Compiz preinstalled, although I’ll have to make a couple of changes to my graphics settings if I want that to work properly. Other than that… not much different. Some of the programs are updated, which is nice. I would love to see Gnome 2.18 included, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Maybe in a later release? I don’t know! Anyway, overall it seems pretty awesome.

Last night I went out with my flatmate Jack, and his girlfriend Grace and their friend Abby, to see the lights go off for Earth Hour. At street level it wasn’t different at all (well, you can’t really turn out all the street lights and stuff!), but when you looked up at some of the towers, they were PITCH BLACK and they just blended in with the night sky! It was pretty awesome to see. We also wanted to go out for tea though. And Jack and Grace still being 17 caused some problems. Soo many of the places you had to be over 18 to go within 100 metres of them! Almost… Anyway, we walked around heaps and eventually (read: at about 9pm) found somewhere that we were all happy with. Oh well… was a nice night despite the long wait for a meal.

Oh yeah, last week I got a haircut. My hair is really short! Well… not REALLY short, but a lot shorter than I am used to. Because it was pretty long before… Just getting to that stage where it starts to PISS ME OFF. Hehe… Yelling in blogs is fun! Okay that’s it for fun news. I better go do some assignments. Bye!