Well it rained most of the weekend and all the way home it was raining too. Mmm, I love it :) Unfortunately there was an accident on the highway that we passed at one point (after quite a wait). It seems that a motorbike had hit two cars... ouch.

It's also been raining on and off here over the last two days and it looks like staying that way. It's much colder now too. Meanwhile though I've been working out computer purchases (ah I love it!). I've just placed an order for three computers (mmm, computers) and some other interesting stuff, for the office installation. I'm trying to have it ready ahead of time so there won't be a major change-over problem. The less hassle the better it is for everyone. I'll be figuring out the networking gear over the next week also so that I can get them in here at home and have them all running together to see how everything will fit in. In the month or so that they'll be waiting to be moved to the new office, they're going to make one hell of an RC5 block crunching farm, LOL ;) (yeah that's all I really care about, heh, j/k)

They'll all be running Windows 2000 Professional which will make configuration a LOT easier. All that's left to decide on is the server really, and it'll be a lot less of a hassle to set up (less software overall, no things like monitors to order).

On the topic of computers, my own computer is now back to dual monitors. Today the replacement card for the one that died so long ago arrived and after some hassles I managed to get it running with the GF3. So... it's all good!

Meanwhile my brother's house is at lockup stage and is heading to be finished on time (which is very good news considering he's moving in a month).

I'm going to update this again tonight! Right now it's time for a coffee and a clean up of this desk (which has collected even MORE junk!).

Here I am in Brisbane again, illuminated by my laptop. I've taken a fair bit of footage tonight while we were out driving around. I'm thinking of making a kind of short abstract film out of it. I dunno *shrugs* it won't have a plot, it'll just be a collage of video really.

Tomorrow I'll be picking up that LCD screen (mentioned in the previous entry) and then heading to the Gold Coast. I wish I had time to visit all of my friends down here... there are a lot of them that I haven't seen in months and they keep telling me "when you're down in Brisbane next, come and see us". At least it's nice to know they want to see me... better than them saying "when you're in Brisbane next, please don't see me or I'll call the police again"... heh.

To a totally different subject now... I have to mail something while I'm here... snail mail...! It's a pre-paid envelope, to be exact. I received some snail mail spam today in my mail box, advertising that I should sign up my commercial website (not this one) to a website search engine submission company calling themselves InternetLink (how original) - for the low price of $297 per year...! I'm not sure what you might think, but to me, I'd much rather submit my site to search engines for free, like I already have, than be pestered to sign up to some company that's going to do the same thing while taking my money away from me. I especially didn't like the tone of their advertising - which was unsolicited, unwanted, boring and a waste of paper and resources. I don't like junk mail for similar reasons. Where does the pre-paid letter come in then? Thankfully, they included one to send the application and credit card details back to them. I'll be sending it to them alright... but it'll be sealed and empty >:) If they're going to waste my time and send me junk, I may as well waste theirs and send it back to them.

I encourage you to do the same. There are a lot of companies that do this, be they credit card companies, department stores, superannuation investors or banks. Give them the message that you'd rather not receive this kind of junk and send it on back at a cost to them.

Evil? Not really... but when was the last time one of these big companies really helped you?

Nite all ;)

Since I've been busy again and I'm only just getting a small amount of free time now, it's time for an update!

Still working away as usual. Slowly getting through the work and some clients are starting to get organised with their projects so that I can begin work on them, which is always good.

Yesterday I had an ADSL outage for about 10 minutes, where it wouldn't authenticate with the network (the now-infamous ERROR 721). I called the help desk (unfortunately an STD call) but I was quickly connected and told that the error was common with the particular brand and model of ADSL modem that I'd been supplied with by them. They said that it requires a line reset by Telstra and replacement of the modem with a different brand, as it's a common fault. Well, I didn't really like the idea of a line reset because I've heard horror stories where Telstra "doesn't get around" to resetting the line for weeks, but there didn't seem like any other options. After another 15 minutes of being offline, the ADSL magically authenticated and started working again, so I called the help desk back and told them. They told me that if it was working again a line reset wouldn't be required and they'd cancel the order with Telstra, but would still send me the replacement modem to ensure that it didn't happen again. Yey :D One other good thing is that at least they said the postage and the modem are all free and that return of the old modem is pre-paid. Woo :D It's nice to know that the tech support is reasonable.

Today is also the last day of my billing period, so it's a good opportunity to download what I want. Currently I've downloaded just over 9.3 GB this month, heh.

I'm looking at ordering a Sony MDX-66XLP 6 MD changer for my car next month when they become available in the UK. Maybe if I'm really lucky Sony might release them here, but that's wishful thinking.

Tomorrow I'll be heading to Brisbane for the weekend, and probably the Gold Coast again at some point. My brother and sister-in-law's house that's being built here is coming along well, and the brick-work is complete. Most of the plastering has been done too, so it's nearly ready to be locked up and painted. They'll be moving up here in about 1-2 months, as far as I know.

We're also currently planning the new office for my dad and my brother's accounting practice. We'll be picking up an LCD monitor on the weekend as well, which is for the front desk computer. Apart from that I've been trying to work out the finer details of the network (which is a little difficult to do at times because there are so many things that need to be taken in to account). Ultimately, I'm hoping to have a wireless link from here to the office, which is about 650 m away "as the crow flies". The issue is going to be trees. This place is terrible for wireless links because it's flat, has high humidity, and there are trees everywhere! All of those things contribute to a headache in determining if it's possible to get a stable link happening. Most other objects aren't an issue, unless they contain water (like trees do) or they're very dense. I'll have to scout out the path and see what we have to secretly destroy in the middle of the night....... juusstttt kidding.

I plan on writing another DVD review tonight... it's been a while since the last one and there are a pile out there waiting. Time is the factor. And maybe coffee as well :)

10 000 people. Are you all CRAZY?!

What is going ON here. How can there possibly be that many hits to this site. It *scares* me to think what you're all coming here for, LOL. Don't you all have enough in your lives already? Come on, I'm really not that interesting (really). There *must* be better things to do with your time than come here. I can name about 50 more interesting activities off the top of my head (none of which even involve interaction with other human beings).

PLEASE, I beg you, do... something... ANYTHING.

With that out of the way, thank you all for coming to my site, heh ;)

Headed down to the Gold Coast briefly yesterday to see my oldest brother, his wife and my little nephew. Right now though I'm heading home. It's raining and we're cruising along the highway, which seems busier than usual. I must look pretty strange sitting in the back with my headphones on staring at a laptop :) These new headphones are great too. I think that 5-30000 Hz is pretty good ;) It sure makes listening to The Prodigy all the more interesting. I'm hearing stuff in the music that I've never noticed before. Plus they come with a cool blue-pearlescent carry case :P~~

*watches droplets streak down the windows* After a long break I feel that it's time to start work on Rêves Digitaux II again. I'm in the mood for creating strange little images >:D I've thought of releasing them all on this site but the last time I tried to upload some large images I was met with a "Disk quota reached" error :/ I'll have to either hunt around for somewhere to store them or put them all on my other server.

As of the 30th of this month, my old e-mail address lance.birch@usa.net will no longer be in operation, so for those running spam businesses, now's the time to sign me up to all your "you've been selected to work from home!" and "sexy teens live!" mail lists :P While there are a lot of site registrations I'll have to spend time moving to a new address, having an old address expire is a good way to avoid unwanted spam (...and people, heh).

*goes back to coding* >:)

Here I am once more, sitting in front of my laptop on my bed, in the dark. Arrived in Brisbane a few hours ago - heading to the Gold Coast tomorrow.

Work is my life right now, as it pretty much has been over the past few months. I guess it's good to have things in that area growing, but it'd also be nice to have some kind of personal life again, which seems to be all but lost. Ah well, everything's a balance I guess - things could be a lot worse! The good side to this is at least I'm keeping my clients happy. Another quote signed this week, amazingly enough without any questions being asked first. After buying my car, I think it's time to start saving some money again (as much as I'd love to run out and buy a nice new MiniDisc changer, it can wait). The one thing that I can say through all of this, is that despite what might be going on, I'm usually a constant. At least I have that to hold on to. There's nothing more disconcerting than realising you've changed yourself to suit other people, for the worse.

Aside from those daily ponderings, things are slowly sliding in to winter. In my opinion, not a moment too soon ;) There's been rain about the past few days which has been... calming (and, well... wet). It's helped to clear my mind for the task of reprogramming a lot of the Coffee Lounge. I'm changing the way the database works to allow for better tracking of funds. It'll show more detailed reports for the clients and allow me to know exactly what I've paid out and been paid, and when. This should hopefully streamline my taxation a little more.

OK, that's all pretty boring (you know it, and I know it) so I'll cut this entry off now.

Nite ya'll.

Well I watched the the Big Brother II launch and it was entertaining. The servers that host the BB site went down (of course) as they were no doubt swamped with hundreds of thousands of requests by addicted fans. I watched as the servers restarted just a few minutes ago and I decided to take a look in the forums. Wow, what can I say. What a bunch of whinging, ridiculous, addicted losers. Instead of congratulating the admins on being able to bring the site back online (while I'm sure all of the addicted members were constantly pinging the cluster and causing even more traffic by holding down F5, etc), they were bagging them, while making completely fools of themselves, complaining that the site was offline for several hours and that the live streams weren't online yet. LOL.

I'm amazed... no... I'm shocked. I really don't have words to describe these people. Here they are at 2:30 AM complaining that the live streams of a TV show aren't online, making personal attacks at the crew and vigorously whinging that it's unacceptable that the site was offline for so long, while they're the ones causing the problems, wondering why no official replies to them are being made.

Then of course there are the Linux geeks boasting that their 386s running Apache are apparently superior hosting platforms in comparison to the massively parallel distributed cluster of IIS servers that's hosting the Big Brother II website, proclaiming that their 'leet linux boxen' have uptimes of over a month.

It's absurd and quite scary that these people have so little in their lives that they're furiously complaining and heartbroken because they can't see 'the housemates!' and have such unrealistic expectations of the initial reliability of a system that is being put to the ultimate stress test. Then of course, there's the fact that you have to pay to get the streams (which of course they want for free). Now, I'm no Einstein, but then again it also doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that bandwidth costs money. They seem to fail to see this simple fact, wondering why they can't have unlimited streams from the cameras to any part of the internet. They keep asking why only iPrimus users signed up to the account can view it and why people from the outside can't pay for the experience. Gee, let me think, maybe because iPrimus is hosting the site and it costs nothing to distribute it to their own users (on their own network) but costs a small fortune to provide streams to external networks.

Let's say the streams were 50 Kbit/s, or roughly 6.25 KB/s. Let's take a conservative estimate and say that 10 000 people are viewing one stream each, simultaneously. That's 6.25*10 000 = 62 500 KB/s, or about 61 MB/s. And let's say that this is kept up for... 10 hours of user time each day (this is very conservative and takes in to account that most users wouldn't be viewing it for many hours, if an hour, a day, and that there are vastly more than 10 000 people using the site). That's 61*60*60*10 = 2 196 000 MB. For 85 days. 186660000 MB, or a crazy 178 TB (terabytes) of data. Now, those on broadband know that large ISPs pay usually per GB, and charge the end user around 12 cents per MB at the very least. Let's assume then that the ISP is making a nice profit on this because they get a big discount because of the huge amounts of data they transfer, and they only get charged 4 cents per MB. Now, for 178 TB... that's a hefty $7.5 million! And they wonder why they're not getting it for free. LOL.

Well, that's my rant for the night! Have a nice sleep everyone :)

Yikes OK so it's been several days since I bothered to update this thing, let's have a look at what's been going on, shall we?

First off my brother and his wife, and my little nephew are here for the weekend :) Their house is still being built and is progressing pretty well. It'll be finished in no time!

Once again my brother has managed to get me addicted to pinball, and my other brother has got me addicted to good old Sonic CD. Oh my, it's a trap.

My ADSL has been running pretty well and I'm using this weekend to do some uber downloading, because I have oodles of GBs left in my off peak data quota :D Meanwhile Big Brother II starts tomorrow. I can see myself watching it every night. It's a bit like a soap... ridiculous and stupid plot, strange characters that you love to hate and a cliff hanger every week.

I've also been working on my download meter some more... getting rid of the bugs. It's working quite nicely but I have to optimise the drawing routine... it's very inefficient and CPU intensive. I didn't notice it at first because this computer is so fast... but when I stuck it on my server, it slowed it to a crawl. I know how to fix the problem, but it's going to take quite a bit of coding to do.

-- Break for a few hours and returns: it's now Sunday, read above as though it was Saturday ;) --

Just got back from a midnight maccas muchies run. Mmm... gotta love the saturated fats of McDonalds fast foods, heh.

The government did an awesome thing this week in Australia: allowed stem cell research to go ahead. It's the best thing the Prime Minister has done since he was elected! It nearly makes up for him introducing an unworkable GST :|

*looks at TV* Now I believe that I've seen it all. The latest info-mercial is for "Psychic Luck", LOL. Selling luck! What next?! It's one thing selling a cheaply made product that doesn't work, but it's a different level of con-selling to market something completely unquantifiable! LOL.

On that note, I'm going to call it a night and get some sleep. More updates to come :)

It's been pretty cold lately, which is nice for a change. It's also been raining on and off lightly. From now on, the weather can only get colder. Yey :D

Easter was pretty good, my oldest brother and his wife came up for the weekend (with my little nephew too :D) and also my second oldest brother, so there was a whole family get-together feel about it.

With the help of dad, I've been making a monitor stand to sit my dual screens on. I wanted them higher so that they'd be at eye-level. It's worked out pretty good and it just has to have the finishing touches put on it and a coat of paint. I also experimented with some virtual private networking today and things like direct dial-in between this computer and my laptop. I'm working out ways to access a network directly from remote computers.

I've also had the motivation to start writing my own IRC bot. Its current incarnation, called GhostShell, isn't running too badly. I had some trouble writing the !seen script (used for checking when someone was last online) but I think I've found all the bugs now. I'm going to be slowly adding features as I think of them and one day it might be of more use than just logging channels.

And now...



With that out of the way...

I'm finding it a lot of fun to go driving in my car now. It's great to be able to hop in and just go for a drive, or to pick up something or check things out that are of interest. It adds an additional and welcome element of freedom to my lifestyle and I have to say that owning your own car is a great feeling. Plus, I find myself constantly taking the scenic route home :) I just... enjoy driving :)

As earth is slowly turning and the time is creeping away, now's an appropriate point to say goodnight and head off to bed for some sleep. I'll be attempting to update this with my thoughts and just general info on a more regular basis from now on. Hope you had a great Easter (regardless of what it means to you, e.g. religion, easter eggs, family :) and I'll talk to you later ;) Nite!