February, 2005

Had an inspection at the flat today. I think for the first time the chick that does the inspection realised how serious the shower problem is.

Seems having wet carpet and mould in the cupboard on the other side of the shower is a bad thing *duh* As it looks now the whole shower needs to be renovated cause the times are starting to fall off and the cement is cracking. I cant imagine the walls between the shower and cupboard is much better.

Ive been trying to get them to fix it since the drain backed up in the bathroom about 6 months ago, since then ive had like 3 guys come and look at it. One guy said theres not much he could do – it needs to be renovated. The second guy came and ran some sealant along the edge of the shower which of course did bugger all and was useless. The third guy came and actually scraped the sealant off that the second guy had put there. *shrugs*

So instead of having a small job to patch up and pssibly fix, it seems in my opinion that the shower needs to be ripped out and redone.

Oh well, time will tell. In the meantime theres nothing in the cupboard and it hasnt started stinking or anything yet.

Its my mums birthday today!

Happy Birthday MA!

Ill give her a call tonight, didnt get a chance this morning… had an inspection.. more on that later.

Ive noticed recently that when im sitting normally with my eyes open, one always opens more then the other or as the case may be, one doesnt open as wide as the other… Is that normal?

Had to take some photos of myself for a interview thing i had for the Apple scholorship i got and out of the 10 or so pictures, only 2 were deemed good enough. Seems taking a closeup shot of my face looks weird cause it looks like one of my eyes is gummy or somthing.

*shrugs* weird eh?

After being left to rot for the past few months, i am attempting to resurect Macgeeks.net. Things got a bit hectic and i didnt have time to add much to it, bit of a shame really as it was growing well.

Anyway, Im not sure whether to stay with mambo (while upgading to the latest version), or stick with something simplier like Wordpress and use its new pages features. Its a tough call. I mean mambo has some great features and is perfect for running a community site, but theres so many modules and addons and very few nice themes that ive managed to find. The update process from the version running now seems like a nightmare of copying over all the addons and ensuring they work, if not then its searching on the web i go looking for updated versions.

I guess ill investigate a bit more and see what turns up. Anyone reading? Any suggestions?

Just ordered the second Warcraft: War of the Ancients book. “The Demon Soul” is the second book in the trilogy which follows on from “The Well of Eternity”.

I really enjoyed the first book, hopefully the second will be just as enjoyable.

Bought it through SeekBooks.com.au. Their site looks kinda dodgy, but its actually very user friendly and easy to get the info you need.

Ill hold my final comments about seekbooks until after i actually get the book (If i actually get it )

On a side note, i wonder if Thomas ever read the first book copy that i gave him. He hasnt said anything about it so im guessing he hasnt. Should have just kept it myself and sold it

I just figured out that if you clear the cookies in your web browser you can keep reading Sydney Morning Herald articles without getting the stupid ’sign up’ page.

Clearing cookies is easy too, its just a setting in most web broswers.

Woohoo!

Theres lots of cool sounding news over at the Sydney Morning Herald. I say ‘cool sounding’ because i cant actually read the articles becuase it wants me to register.

I hate that, The articles are freely available, but you have to signup to view them. Apart from it sounding like a massive scheme to get email addresses for advertising, its also a pain having to register and sign in for multiple sites that you read.

I dont see what the point is. All it does is stop me from reading the site. It also stops me linking to cool stuff as noone else will be able to read the article unless they register as well. *sigh*

Time to find another Australian online newspaper. *shrugs*

Yup, I just updated to WordPress 1.5 and so far im impressed. The inbuilt spam filtering is enough for me. At the moment im using the theme that comes with it, its not too bad and looks nice and simple. Ill probably change it at some later date a bit.

So yeah – upgrade took about 10mins, had a little permission problem but sorted that out quick. All posts / comments / settings accounted for.

Nice job wordpress devs

Interestng article (NOTE: Link will probably take you to a sign in page, if so, dont bother) over at the Sydney Morning Herald webpage. The guy is talking about ‘apples second coming’. Has some interesting thoughts about what apple did / is doing wrong. Also talks a bit about what they are doing right. He kinda defends windows and ‘beige boxes’ but the bit i like is:

Like millions of others, I am a proud iPod owner. Being able to take every piece of music I own with me wherever I go has changed my life. Apple is basking in the “halo effect” of the iPod, and many who would not previously have considered a Mac are now doing so.

I am one of these. Owing to a realignment of certain business activities, I find myself the proud owner of two Macintoshes. I would never consider them as my primary computer, because the Windows world is so much bigger and offers so much more, but for some functions they cannot be surpassed.

The windows world is bigger and offers much more – ok *shrugs*, i just like how he owns an ipod and 2 macintoshs. Seems kinda ironic.. heh

Currently reading/browsing this book. Its pretty interesting and goes into a lot of detail on lowish level unix stuff.

Has a great section on gdb (the debugger) as well, amazing what you can do with that if you know the right commands.

hrmmm, other books im reading in some shape or form include:
* Applescript the definitive guide
* Numbers XLib and X11 programming books

Thats about it. I havnt read a non computer related book in a while. Seems to be something i dont do much anymore. *shrugs*

My old Panasonic dvd player has been playing up for a while, so i bit the bullet on the weekend and got a new LG DF8900P. Its pretty cool, very thin and has some cool features. The one i like the most is the DivX compatibility

So far its played every disc ive thrown at it. Its very cool being able to put a DVD in that has a heap of DivX movies and just watch them.

Cost me $150 from the Good Guys here in Rocky. The shelf and retail price is around $189 so i got a good deal.

Melanie tells me its the Chinese new year today. Apparently you’re not meant to wash or clean anything cause at the start of the year you get all the luck for the rest of the year and if you clean or wash it will all go away.

Thats pretty cool. I woke up this morning covered in a lot of ‘luck’, id usually think it was sweat from the heat up here but oh well. Anyway since i had so much, i thought it would be ok to wash a little off so i took a quick shower. Im still feeling lucky so hopefully all should be good.

Damn shame i cant shave today though, cant go washing the luck away too much

Theres no need to worry about the end of the world. According to the bible basher bloke that came to my door this morning everything will be fine cause all religions will join together and stop all fighting. *cheer*

He read some passage out of his little bible about everyone joining under the one religion and everything being peachy. He was actually a pretty decent bloke – didnt carry on, just said his thing, offered to leave one of those pamphlets which i said no to and he left.

The message i got out of his visit? To paraphrase the guy:

” We have dug ourselves into a bloody big hole, but dont worry, when the shit hits the fan the big bloke upstairs will come through with the goods”

or somthing like that