Life in the Geek Lane

So it’s the wet season at the moment, and it sure has been wet. There’s been mild flooding due to heavy rainfall up north, which of course has to flow somewhere but Rocky managed to get out of it pretty well.

The general pattern seems to be a patch of rainy days, followed by days of showers in the afternoon, followed by stinking hot and humid days.

As an example, the weather last Thursday was as follows:

Rockhampton, Queensland Current Conditions - 7:00 AM EST Feb. 7: “Temperature: 75°F / 24°C | Humidity: 94% | Pressure: 29.59in / 1002hPa | Conditions: Partly Cloudy | Wind Direction: NNW | Wind Speed: 5mph / 7km/h | Updated: 7:00 AM EST”

(Via Weather Underground - Rockhampton, Queensland.)

So at 7:00am, we were 24°C with a sweating hot 94% humidity. It doesn’t get that hot in Rocky, but the humidity is a killer. It literally gets hard to breath.

At this time of the year, I think I much prefer it to be raining then sunny and humid.

6.5 hours till melanie gets back!

My New Scientist subscription is out of control!

I am currently up to the July 7th issue from last year and making slow progress. I am still reading them regularly, but I find myself wanting to really understand ALL the articles which means I tend to read some articles more then once, which slows down progress somewhat.

So that means I have 25 issues to read (not counting the issue that will show up next monday/tuesday) which works out to be half a years worth of reading.

I think I have to start taking proper lunches, and go outside or away from my desk and read them.

Anyway, I’ll check in again in a few months. Hopefully I can get them a bit more under control by then

The new Redhill homemaker centre in rocky has this huge sign on one of the shop walls.

Perhaps someone needs to enhance their spellchecker?

When it comes to beef, I was a “well done” person for a long time. I think this was mainly because “well done” is the easiest way to cook beef because all you have to do is throw it in the pan and take it out when it is smoking / burnt.

Strangely enough though, whenever I go out I always order medium / medium well because well done in restaurants tends to be charcoal.

This past week I’ve been fiddling with cooking my own beef to medium / medium well grade and I’m actually quite impressed with my efforts.

The beef definitely tastes better as well when it has some juices left in it. Not “sitting in a pool of blood” juices, but just enough to keep it moist and chewable.

Also, as I posted in a previous entry, marinating the beef in lemon and pepper before cooking is really nice. It seems like the beef doesn’t need to be marinating in the lemon for a long time, even popping it in and turning it around a few times before putting it in the pan gives it a nice taste.

I’ve had a strange craving for lemon since I got back to Rocky.

I marinated steak with lemon (which was really really nice), had squeezed lemon juice in water numerous times and just ate a lemon straight.

I’ve got no idea why.

Another year over, and a new one just beginning.

Will be a very busy year. I have much planned.

Resolutions to come later, I have a fair few things that I want to narrow down.

I spent christmas at home in Inverell again this year. Melanie went home to her parents in America.

I got to see my nephews in the flesh again, and it was a lot of fun. Little people are very cool and watching their mannerism’s and the way they view the world is enjoyable. I definitely need to make more time to see them this year, they grow up way too fast and they need to know who their Uncle Brett is.
Christmas was good, we had a small gathering at home with the usual food and laughs. I enjoy spending Christmas with family and friends.

My last living grand parent died recently. I was home at the time for xmas and got to see her a few days before.

It’s sad to say, but I don’t feel at all sad. The Grannie I like to remember died many years ago and I feel like I’ve done my mourning. I have fond memories of both her and Gramps which will stay with me forever.

Really makes me stand back and look at how I live my life. I hope I never become a bitter person. Life is too short to hold grudges and it seems like such a strain to be always fighting and bickering with people. I guess I made the decision a while ago that I wouldn’t have any part of it. Some people might take the wrong way, but I really don’t care.

When it comes down to it, it’s far to easy for people to stand back and make judgements without actually being there and knowing what really happens.

Hopefully Grannie has finally found real peace, she will be missed.

We get a lot of tele-marketer calls during the afternoon, usually between 5pm - 7pm. Usually I like to answer them to hear what kind of deals they are doing on whatever the heck it is that they are selling.

Anyway, today the phone rings and it was one of those annoying automated services where as soon as you answer you are put on hold. So I’m on hold for maybe 5 seconds when it switches me through to a really cool sounding guy who informs me that I have been selected to get a heavily discounted price on a stay at their resort.

So he continues on with his memorised sales pitch when I interrupt him with

>”I’m not interested”

He replies with

>”Is is because of the location?”

To which I reply

>”No, it’s because I was put on hold as soon as I answered the phone, which I find very rude”

He went silent for a bit, then told me that it wasn’t his fault. I told him I knew it wasn’t his fault but if he could pass the message on to his supervisor I would be grateful.

He then started talking about how he didn’t know it did that, and how he would have to have a word to his supervisor about it. I agreed then thanked him, he thanked me and we hung up.

So fun talking to tele-marketers!

Grabbed a copy of MarsEdit the other day and I’m really liking it. Makes posting to multiple blogs so simple. I still use the ‘Edit in Textmate’ option for linking to urls and stuff, so in a way I’m still using Textmate, but I just like the UI of MarsEdit /shrug.

Plus, the support from Daniel at Red Sweater was second to none after I sent off a few emails with various questions. So I decided to support him since the app is really good (and was cheap the day I bought it ).

So yeah, that’s why I have the little MarsEdit badge on the menu now

Facebook seemed cool when I joined a few months ago. It allowed me to find people I had lost contact with which was neat but recently I’ve kinda grown tired of it.

The friend finder aspect of it is great, I found a lot of old friends, but I’m getting sick of all the stupid little ‘mini applications’ that are floating around. It’s really starting to remind me of MySpace, which I loathe.

Some of the applications are cool and useful, but I think probably 85% - 90% of them are completely useless.

The thing that really annoys me is the oodles of ‘invites’ I get to join some team, or take some test, or do some ‘thing’. All the applications have a ‘invite your friends’ section where you can select the friends you want to share it with. I swear most people just choose the ’select all’ option and send it off, which effectively spams everyone to join this new application.

I’ve received messages from people, which I apparently can’t read because I don’t have the required application installed. I have no wish to add all this useless stuff to my profile, so the message effectively gets lost.

It just looks like facebook is becoming too commercialised.

So yeah, I love how easy it is to track people down that I had lost contact with, but the extra crap that is starting to clog down my facebook page is annoying.

Why don’t people use turning lanes?

The shopping centre close by here has a separate turning lane for cars to merge into then turn into the shopping centre. It’s meant to allow for traffic to continue to flow even if someone wishes to slow down and enter the shopping centre.

Everyday I see someone who refuses to use the lane, and instead, stay in the ‘through’ lane until the last minute then turn. why?.

I really don’t understand it. There is plenty of room in the turning lane for the car to enter and turn into the shopping centre. People seem to think they are driving semi-trailers and cannot turn that sharp.

I can understand delivery trucks and possibly large four wheel drives having trouble turning that sharp, but not small cars, which seem to the the usual suspects.

So, Why don’t people use the turning lane?

Cooked up a roast for tea tonight. Picked it from IGA earlier in the week. I’d never seen marinated ones at IGA before so thought I’d try it out.

Only realised after I got it home that it had no cooking instructions, so I had to kind of wing it. Turns out I went pretty well. Took about 2.5 hours to cook, and it was awesome.

Didn’t bother with baked veggies this time, it’s too hot here anyway, so I went with just a plain roast beef sandwich.

Also means I’ve got enough leftovers for the rest of the week!

yum!

Went and saw Beowulf tonight. I had watched the trailers or it and didn’t really think much of it. Anyway, with not much else to do at 8:50pm on a Saturday night I decided to go.

Turns out that it wasn’t too bad at all. Perhaps my ‘not expecting anything great’ attitude helped make it more enjoyable, but overall I found it quite entertaining and there was an actual story involved.

The animation was very cool as well. Some sections had me wondering if the images were actual footage of the actors or just animated.

It ended with an obvious sequel lead-in, but I felt like enough had been accomplished during the film that the ‘to be continued’ feel at the end wasn’t at all disappointing.

I’d recommend it for people who like swords / demons / dragons.

I purchased NetNewsWire back when it was not part of the NewsGator group and have been very pleased with it.

The other day I received an email stating that my premium NewsGator membership was running out soon, and by renewing I would continue to get updates for NetNewsWire.

I found this kind of strange. I’d already purchased NetNewsWire, and I expected to receive minor updates for free without further payments being necessary. I can understand having to pay for major releases but when I bought the product there was no ’subscription required’ clause mentioned that would indicate I would have to pay $20 per year for updates.

So I replied to the email, asking for clarification. The response I got confirmed what I thought. In order to receive any kind of updates, I needed to subscribe to the premium NewsGator service for $20 (USD) a year. The reply I received talked about how the $20 also includes a syncing service and allowed me to sync any number of other NewsGator products like FeedBurner.

None of that ‘extra’ stuff meant anything to me. I use .mac to sync my feeds, I don’t use FeedBurner or any other of the NewsGator services. So basically I would be paying $20 a year to receive updates to a program I had already purchased, including minor updates.

This seems ridiculous to me and I am kind of annoyed as I purchased NetNewsWire before it moved to NewsGator, when the whole ‘Premium subscription’ bullshit didn’t exist.

So I am left with an app that I will no longer get updates for. Looks like I will be ditching NetNewsWire soon for some other alternative. One that isn’t controlled by a company that is only interested in pimping out its subscription based services.

Very disappointed.

So I’m slowly getting through my New Scientist magazines and have been meaning to post about interesting stuff. In the June 30 edition, there is a small write-up on the bottom of page 14 titled “You may want to yawn before reading this”.

It suggests that the reason why we yawn is to “boost blood flow and chill the brain”, which effectively increases attentiveness. This result was reached by conducting a study involving 44 college students who watched yawning sequences.

“Students were told to inhale and exhale in one of four ways: strictly orally; strictly nasally; orally while wearing a nose plug; or just breathe normally”.

Fifty percent of those told to breathe through their mouths yawned, while none of the people told to breathe through their nose yawned.

“Blood vessels in the nasal cavity send cool blood to the brain, so breathing through the nose or cooling the forehead cools the brain and eliminates the need to yawn”.

Brains work better when cool, so yawning is basically the bodies way of cooling the brain down.

Very cool.

I bought a new external hard drive recently to use as a time machine backup drive. Anyway, I was having all sorts of problems with the firewire 800 connection. It would just randomly unmount the disc and give me a ‘The disc was unmounted and files may be lost” type message.

The firewire 400 port on it would work fine, but as soon as I plugged it in via firewire 800 it would randomly unmount.

Same thing would happen if I had it plugged in via firewire 800, then plugged in a separate firewire 400 hard drive. The 400 connected drive would show up and the 800 would unmount.

Went and tried it out at the mac shop and it works fine, which kind of indicates a problem with my iMacs firewire 800 port. So I have to take the iMac back in for them to look at.

Such a pain, having to cart the iMac back to the shop. It’s not exactly the easiest thing in the world to carry around.

It’s still under warranty, which is good, but the hassle of having to take it in and get it looked at then fixed is a pain.

I’ll probably take it in tomorrow, if they can’t fix it before the weekend I’ll just get it back and take it in again next week.

bleh…

So I haven’t blogged in a really long time. Been pretty busy working and what not.

Anyway, updates are coming soon… hopefully with photos and stuff.

So yeah, that’s it.

Well the truck is going well. So far I’ve run about 6 liters of fuel through it with only minor problems. The heat related issues I was talking about in the previous post was related too the fuel mix being too lean, which of course causes the engine to run a lot hotter. So after getting that tuned properly, the truck has been running well.

Only major problem has been one of the bearings inside the clutch bell breaking, causes pieces of it to get scattered through the gear spurs. Cost me around $20 for 2 new bearings (only needed 1 in the end) and new hi and low spurs. I spent a few hours on the weekend pulling it apart and getting it fixed.

While I had it pulled apart, I decided to install a rear spoiler / wing as well. A lot of stuff I have read say it’s a good idea to have one, not only for stability while jumping but also to protect the back of the body and also the engine / fuel tank when it rolls over.

The truck is a lot dirtier now and looks pretty well worn in. Even blowing it down with an air compressor after running it, it still gathers a lot of dust and gunk. I imagine sooner or later I’m going to have to strip it down and give it a good clean.

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