I find domain camping very frustrating. For those that don't know what domain camping involves, it's basically a practice of someone registering a domain that they don't plan on using in the hope that someone will then be forced to buy it off them for an exorbitant price.

To me it's like getting a great parking space that's untimed and then advertising it for sale, even though you don't need to park your car there.

There's a particular domain that I had a project planned for, but it seems the person doesn't want to part with it unless they get several thousand dollars. What they don't understand is that the demographic for that domain is not willing to pay that much money, so they'll never get any return from their camping. I feel that domain camping will eventually disappear and in a way it really has to.

If no one is willing to buy domains at inflated prices then the campers will lose money and give up. On the other hand if people continue to buy domains at inflated prices and put them to use, all of the good domains for campers will disappear and the market for domain campers will vanish. Essentially they're destroying their own market (though this doesn't bother me).

My brother is here now and challenging me to games of pool, which is helping to improve my 'skill' a little.

The next week is going to be very... interesting... *ponders*



Summer is here. Technically it's not, but it really feels like it! We've also had some stormy weather too, with lightning licking the sky a few afternoons ago.

Work's progressing well and it's holiday season, so the entire town has become more active as it fills up with tourists. Now, instead of the streets being dead at 10 PM, they're dead at... 11 PM. Heh ;)

A lot of my relatives are here at the moment for two weeks and my brother will be coming up this Friday and staying for a week.

My sleep patterns are slightly more natural now that I'm not heading to bed at sunrise. Usually these days I get woken up by a phone call though and as of today I'm planning on making things worse in that department by hooking up the other line (which I can't hear from my room) to the cordless - I don't know why I punish myself ;) Heh.

The room is tidier now with the pool table having the computer parts debris cleared off it. Now it means I can play pool again! I'm shockingly out of practise.

I'll head off again now but don't worry, I'll be back with more ramblings!

"there is no 'insignificant' - all of life is a part of life"

OK, I know I'm a dirty rotten liar about updating on the weekend but things got in the way and...

Well I'm just making more excuses, I'll update tomorrow :P

What a week! Every night I've gone to bed post 5 AM... once going right through until 9 AM... craazzzzyy.

Crossing Over with John Edward is starting next Tuesday on Channel 10 at 8:30 PM. This show rocks, you've GOT to watch it. Very insightful and it may change your view on certain things.

I'll update this again on the weekend after I get back from Brisbane.

:D

Remind Me by Röyksopp, check out the video clip :)

I know I said on Tuesday that I'd update this more regularly, but life got in the way, heh :)

Well, the now infamous September 11th has passed without incident: almost surprising. I have mixed feelings over the issue. My immediate reaction when I heard a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers was to think "how can you put a fire out that high up in a skyscraper and if you can't, what's going to happen to the building". That said, you would think people with greater experience with such things would have ordered an immediate evacuation of both buildings and never sent anyone to the upper floors. Example: a curtain in a school catches fire and the entire school is evacuated, even if there is no major risk. Jumbo jet crashes into a city's tallest building and everyone just wanders around wondering if they should get out or not...

The other thing that ran through my mind was "why is a plane flying near there anyway, surely there's no reason to be flying over Manhattan". Again, this strikes me as something people "in the know" should have considered and then started wondering how a plane got there and was at such a low altitude (less than 400m) to be able to hit a building.

There were so many problems with the whole thing. Where was the airport security? When the planes deviated from their flight paths and no contact was able to be made (considering there were four such planes), why wasn't something done? It took 56 minutes and 102 minutes for the South and North towers to collapse after being hit, respectively: why, given just under and far over an hour, wasn't everyone evacuated from both towers before they collapsed (excepting those trapped above the impact points)?

Given that the World Trade Center twin towers had already gone through terrorist attacks early in the 1990's, wouldn't there be an obvious plan to evacuate everyone the instant there was a problem?

A combination of evil intention and meticulous planning by one side, and complacency and a lack of organisation on the other side, combined to create a very nasty event. Let's not forget the two other planes, one of which hit the Pentagon, the other which would have hit the White House if it had not been taken back over and crashed by its passengers.

I feel sorry and I feel annoyed. Sorry, for obvious reasons. Annoyed, because there was so much that could have been done better that would have prevented the incidents or saved more people.

Then there are the conspiracy theorists and the egotists. The egotists who say it was the architects' fault for not designing the towers well enough (when it's been proven that no building in the world could withstand such an attack - it's a credit to the architects that they stood for so long); the conspiracy theorists that say the towers were actually blown up from the inside by a series of smaller explosions as a 'fail safe' and that it's really all a cover for the US to take over Iraq and use its oil (thus solving the energy crisis in the US).

The egotists are, well, egotists. The conspiracy theorists don't understand physics.

Now, one way or another, Iraq will be attacked. It's just a matter of time, really. For those that don't believe this should be done... how about considering what Iraq has done to its neighbours in the past before casting judgement.

I could really write for days on this subject, because there's so much detail to go into. Above is an over-simplification of the entire issue, covering only a few of the things I found unusual about it all. But it's past 5 AM now, and I should be getting an early night.

This week I've gone to sleep consistently past 5 AM, last night being 6 AM.

So much to tell, so little time.

And remember, before you go doing something foolish, give someone the chance to stop you.

The last week has been like walking through a cyclone.

Now, it's all over :D

Almost everything went to plan with the office on the weekend. The server is in and the wireless link is active and working 100% at 11 mbit/s. All of the computers are in, actually. The network printing is working well and I found a good way to bind network printers to a local LPT port to allow support for the terrible DOS apps.

It was a lot of work but everything's finished with the exception of just a few small details.

I'm swiftly (although in a procrastinating manner) crunching through work. Today it's been easier because I've had few distractions, something that I can now get used to with everyone working at the new office throughout the day. I stayed up until sunrise again last night doing work so my body clock isn't exactly at atomic precision.

I should watch how I drink my coffee while trying to type because I nearly drowned in some then (obviously not paying enough attention! heh).

Until next time (which will be more regular, I promise), don't take candy from strangers!

We're putting the finishing touches on the house antenna today. The office antenna is 100% complete and looks good too. It's large, coming in at 10m high.

One thing to always ask about yourself before starting a project like this should be "is there any sound-proofing in the walls where we want to put the cable?".

If there is, you might want to reconsider ;)

Basically we forgot about there being any in the walls there, and had huge difficulty getting the cable down through. The extension drill that you usually use to drill through nogging doesn't work too well when there's sound-proofing around it... it immediately becomes entangled as you start drilling and tends to have the effect of ripping out nearby phone cables (which we later had to replace). Because of the sound-proofing and the other 20-or-so cables in the wall already, we decided it would be much easier to cut a hole in the wall from the other side (where there's a fridge) and use it to move some of the sound-proofing out of the way and feed the cables through. With stiff 1 cm thick LMR-400 cable, it's still very difficult, but after a lot of fishing around the cable finally made it along with the resurrected phone cabling.

My main concern was "oh no, not my internet ADSL line!". Heh :)

We took the opportunity to rearrange some RJ-45 sockets and give the area a clean, then soldered the N-connector on the antenna cable and gave it a test -> over to the office past midnight with the laptop we went ;)

Happily we watched as it made an immediate connection and ramped the speed up to 11 Mb/s while we watched the home server through VNC with no lag at all :D

Meanwhile, a lot happened at the office on the weekend aside from the antenna going up. It's now painted in its bright colours and looks really good. The painters are coming back tomorrow to finish off the skirtings and then the electrical can be done. We'll be back in to terminate all the network cables and ensure the server is going to fit nicely in the 'data cupboard'. The carpet will then be put down and we'll start moving things in. Next weekend, everything will be complete!

This place is going to be awfully quiet... maybe I need a Bengal to keep my company ;)

That was a long day...

In summary, the wireless connection is up and running and works just fine: 11 Mb/s over 1 km, stable with no packet loss and coming in at around -65 dBm (plenty to spare). I'll explain the finer details (and why we had to take a hacksaw to the inside walls of our house) tomorrow when I'm not so tired, heh.

This is the first time in a long time I've felt physically very tired and with no feeling of wanting to stay awake any longer.

'night :)