The Blag of Elizabeth Helen McAnulty

That’s right, Lizzie has a blog! Only one post up so far, but I thought it was pretty cool. Just for reference, she does have an accent.

=D

Read it here!

Home For Christmas

Friday morning I flew back home again! I was dead tired afterwards, as I didn’t get to bed until after midnight, then woke up at about 4am (for an 8am flight). Not cool! Flight home was pretty good though, despite the half-hour delay, and Mum and Grandpa met me at the airport, which was totally rad.

The worst thing about being home has definitely been the cold – it’s absolutely freezing! Yesterday it only made it to 13 degrees, and I doubt today was much better, except for a sunny hour or so this afternoon. Cold and wet and miserable… Typical Ballarat!

Most of the time I’ve spent with Cal looking at car stereos and whatnot, which has been pretty good, although it’s the time with Cal I’ve enjoyed rather than the looking at car stereos. And looking at car stereos means driving, so definitely no complaints there!

Last night I went to Lucy’s housewarming party, which was pretty awesome. I was a bit scared when I parked outside, as there were lots of scary-looking people that I didn’t recognise loitering outside, but it turns out that they were just Lucy’s housemates’ friends, so it was all good. All the people invited by Lucy were huddled inside her room, away from all the emo kids. I had a really good time – it was great to catch up with people. Also it was decided that I might have a party soon so more catching up can be done, which sounds like a pretty awesome idea to me. Now to organise it…

Oh, I also finalised my Christmas shopping, which is super cool. And I’m happy with everything I bought, which is even better. There’s only one thing I’ve gotta finish off, and it sucks because it’s not going to be done on time, but I’m hoping it will be understood. I feel pretty bad about it… *sigh*

Well, I’ll probably see some of you around soon! A bientot!

Dangerous Time of the Year

Sydney is dangerous in leading up to Christmas, it would seem. Well, if you’re driving a vehicle, anyway. Yesterday at work when we were out for lunch, we saw a postal van run straight into the back corner of a truck, with a fair bit of damage to the lights and stuff of the postal van (but none to the truck). Both just drove off.

Last night when I was out for… Stuff… A truck with semi-trailer attached flew out of the lane next to Broadway Shopping Centre, and tried to swing round onto Smail St, before having to stop (just in time) because of the incessant horn-blowing of a nice sports car stopped at the traffic lights in Smail St. By the time the truck stopped, the bottom side of the trailer was above the bonnet of the car, and if it hadn’t stopped the car would’ve been crushed under the wheels of the trailer. You’d think the driver of the semi would apologise and wait for the car to reverse or something, but no, the only thing to come out of his mouth was “well back the fucking thing up!”, yelled out the window. Sheesh! Some people…

I plan to do a bit of last-minute Christmas shopping tonight, so I’m hoping I don’t get in the way of any irate drivers. That would be kinda bad. Wish me luck!

Oh, on a completely random note: I got the most awesome Christmas present ever the other day. Lizzie gave me a home-made 2008 calendar, and for each month it has a special picture of some sort. It’s totally hilarious and awesome!

Full Screen Amarok Controller

When I’m in bed, or at least not sitting at my desk, and there’s music on, I often get annoyed by Amarok’s small Play/Pause/Skip/Volume buttons. They’re generally fine, when I’m not at my desk I have to concentrate on getting the mouse in the right position before clicking, which can be a problem.

So, any normal person would probably either deal with it or buy a remote or something. I have a wireless mouse, so figuring out a way to use it accurately from a distance is considerably cheaper for me than the ‘get a remote’ solution. Which is why I whipped up a little Java program that runs at full screen (on my computer) and has very large buttons, so I can just flail wildly and still hit the right one!

This is a list of bugs and future features:
- It will only work in full screen on a 1024×768 monitor running GNOME. This can be changed by manually editing the window size and then recompiling the program (eww). I’m sure there will be a ‘full screen’ setting in Java, I just couldn’t be bothered finding it.
- It doesn’t yet display the song currently playing. This isn’t a ‘bug’, as such, but a feature I would like to implement. It’s just a bit tricky with the way I’m running the commands at the moment.
- Each command runs a shell script, so it’s not all in Java. I’m sure this can be fixed, but so far I’ve found running commands properly in Java kinda difficult.
- It only works with Amarok. This isn’t likely to change any time soon, unless I get bribed. Even then…
- It doesn’t have a proper name!
- The ‘icons’ are just crappy text. Would be nice to have pictures.
- I should change the button sizes from pixels to percentages, to account for different screen resolutions.
- I’m sure there’s more than that…

Well, if anybody wants a look, everything is in this zip archive. Maybe you’ll get some use out of it? Hah. Oh, and here’s a screenshot!

Any ideas on how to improve it would be greatly appreciated.

RN Interview, Christmas Party, Concerts

I had an RN group interview today, and… I actually had a lot of fun! I was a bit nervous, because I don’t seem to be terribly outgoing in group interviews (eg. Yellow Shirt), but once I got going, I did alright! Admittedly that says nothing about my chances of being selected as an RN, but still, it made the whole process a lot more pleasant. I think one of the maine reasons was actually the people. At the Yellow Shirt interview, there seemed to be an air of real competition, and it affected the mood, whereas at the RN interview, everyone was just friendly, chatted, and got to know each other! This could just be my perception or something, but the atmosphere certainly seemed a lot different and more relaxed.

The best part of it was that even if I don’t get to be an RN, I met some cool people at the interview who I can at least say hi to in the lifts, if not become good friends with! So yeah, definitely a worthwhile experience, regardless of the final outcome.

I’m going to Newcastle again on Saturday, this time for Lizzie’s family’s Christmas party, so I’ll get to meet the family and then sleep over. It’s a tad scary (especially the ‘meeting her brothers’ part), but I’m really looking forward to it all the same.

I’ve been wanting to have another go at KDE (probably KDE4, considering there’s a release candidate out), but I’ll have to wait until the Internet speeds up again (Nathan used the last of it downloading TV shows). There’s some things about it that I really like, so I figure I might as well give it a shot. I can always go back to GNOME!

Speaking of which, All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem is a really awesome song. Like really really awesome.

I don’t if I mentioned many of the concerts I’m going to early next year, but the list is as follows: Andrew Bird, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire (and hopefully Spoon!), Wilco and Michael Buble. I wanted to see Broken Social Scene and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah too, but maybe some other time! Maybe I’ll go to Canada for BSS .

Unplanned Events

Well, hasn’t today been an eventful day? There was a massive thunderstorm hit Sydney this afternoon, which caused flash floods on the streets outside where I live. So what did Rob and I do? Why, we went down into it, of course!

The water was a good 30cm deep at some points, so it was required that we remove our footwear before crossing the street.  Which made it all the more fun, really. Besides the occasional bit of oil and dirt, the water didn’t seem too dirty. The view was much better from street level. Much more dramatic, and we got to stand near the cars going through the really big flood on Kelly St (we weren’t game to even try to see how deep that was…).

Some turned back, some went through slowly and carefully, but then there were others. Renegades, if you wish. Those who saw the flooded road as not an obstacle in between them and their destination, but a challenge. These people didn’t just drive through the flood, they took it on like those soldiers in that movie. You know, where they charge really fast.

Anyway, we saw splashes higher than the cars themselves, wakes, aquaplaning. You name it! It was pretty fun. The people from the building across the road were filming it and cheering cars on. Best time ever! Except that we forgot to take a camera, and by the time we thought of it, the floods had all but disappeared.

This evening, there was not one, but three fire alarms. I stupidly evacuated for all of them, even though I knew at least the second two were false alarms, and I suspected as much from the first. It turned out that it wasn’t some idiot burning their toast, though, as most of us immediately assumed. It seems that room 404E has a faulty detector, as nobody is currently in there. So to prevent us having fire alarms throughout the night, the fireman kindly disabled the smoke detectors on level 4. Which is both a good and a bad thing. I mean, sure, it means we don’t have any more false alarms, but it also means that if there is a real fire, well… Somebody has to call 000. So I guess I hope it’ll be fixed soon?

Oh, and I went out for dinner at the Lansdowne with Rob and Tim, which wasn’t awfully exciting, but it was another unplanned event!

Oh, and I have a new flatmate. His name is Nathan, and he is studying Business. He’s just here for a couple of months in Silke’s room because his place is being refurbished. He seems pretty nice!

Emotum Christmas Breakup 2007

Admittedly this is a bit late, but it’s not too bad! Don’t judge me for it, please? Anyway, the work Christmas breakup was Friday night, and it was an absolute blast!! It was at Strike Bowling Bar, under the building next to ours. The place is awesome, I thoroughly recommend it if anybody wants to go bowling, although I would also strongly recommend booking ahead, as it looks like it gets pretty busy (it was packed when we were there).

The whole place is dark, with fluoro lighting and stuff everywhere. There is also a bar (an open bar, in our case!) and they bring around really nice food and stuff, and you just take what you like (the mini hamburgers were a favourite). It’s a totally awesome place.

I certainly didn’t win the bowling or anything, but I had a helluva lot of fun in the process of losing. Well, not quite losing; I came equal second in my lane, scoring 93. Brett won overall with 159.

I also met James the first, who I managed to avoid throughout the year (by chance, not on purpose!). It was cool to finally meet him (he’s another tester), and thankfully it didn’t break the space-time continuum, as Brett feared might happen.

After we finished bowling, we went into one of Strike’s karaoke rooms. Thankfully I’d had a bit to drink by then (throughout the night I had two tequila sunrises and two and a half bourbon and cokes, so quite a bit for me!), so I wasn’t too shy about having a go, although I made sure there was somebody on the other mike too, so I wasn’t totally on my own! The highlight of the karaoke had to be my duet of Bohemian Rhapsody with my boss, Craig. It was totally rockin’!

After our time ran out in karaoke, we went to the Slip Inn, where I had a drink and then left, as I was pretty tired. Not sure what everyone else got up to, but it was probably a blast anyhow!

Best night out for the year? Definitely! Well, that’s if you don’t count Jack’s 18th in Newcastle, but that wasn’t ‘out’, as such…

In other news, Mum is currently in Sydney, and I spent a good deal of yesterday with her, which was really good fun! Tonight we’re meeting one of her friends that she wanted me to meet, which should be interesting!

Well, I’ll see you all later!