The LCDs arrived yesterday morning and have been working flawlessly. I'm very happy :) I've set them up now, and with the help of dad have a monitor stand (it just has to be painted, which will hopefully happen this weekend - a nice metallic dark grey!).

I've also bought a blue cold cathode that I'm going to mount under it to use as a light at night time. I'm not sure yet if the one I bought is large enough to light up the area I want (what was I thinking, buying something from a local computer store?).

My brother is up this weekend from Brisbane (it must have been months since he was here last), though I think he'll be trying to avoid helping our oldest brother move houses as much as I will ;)

The task that's going to consume most of my time is simply cleaning this room! Walking through it in the dark is like walking through a mine field, you never know what you'll stumble over.

Looks like the new LCDs are working fine...!

More info later, sleep now.

It kinda looks like rain.

The LCDs have arrived at Umart and are going to be picked up by courier on Wednesday, arriving here on Thursday. I would have had them sooner, but it would have meant going with the air freight that was used last time... and I don't particularly trust them (the boxes were slightly damaged and anything could have happened to them on their way here... something that could have caused the faults they were exhibiting). At this point though, I'm still waiting to hear back from Umart, because they have to OK the use of that courier... so at this point, it's still all in limbo. Luck hasn't exactly been going my way in recent times.

I've been assigned the task of formatting and preparing an old computer of ours to give to our friends down the road, so I've spent my spare time doing that over the last couple of days.

A special thainks to the people have that visited my Zazzle gallery and voted on my images, it's appreciated! :)

"don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got 'till it's gone"

I've started putting some of my images up for sale online as posters (In association with Zazzle.com). If you want to check them out, or buy one for yourself or someone else, you can see the first two here. The images are being sold through Zazzle, which is a US-based company. The posters are available in a range of sizes and formats (including thick, glossy, archival papers for framing), up to 1.3 m wide/high.

If you'd like to make a request to see one of my images available, just drop me a note through the Contact page and I'll organise something :) I'll also be combining, at some point, my previous Rêves Digitaux series into a format suitable for poster presentation, in addition to the Blacklight plate (however it won't have the centre pane in fluoro red).

Have fun! :D

So long since I've had the time to make an entry. I suppose first I should say that now I'm 20 years old - my birthday was early last week. Two decades seems like such a long time! *plays with Chinese meditation balls* Thanks ;)

My LCDs are still in limbo, but the latest word is that Hitachi will be replacing them with new units and sending them up to Umart - there's no stock in Queensland at the moment. That's not really surprising, because they must sell very low volumes (evidenced by the serial numbers of the first two - X3A000054 and X3A000061). I prey that when the replacements arrive, hopefully shortly, that they work correctly this time.

I was in Brisbane quickly on the weekend (most of the time seemed to be eroded because of tiredness after arriving late - the cause of that was a trivia competition on the way there, which lasted hours longer than expected) and purchased a pair of new binoculars with some of my birthday money and some savings. I've found a lot of use for binoculars recently, mostly just an interest thing of "what's that tiny thing way over there". They're useful for checking out wireless antennas, too. So, after researching it a bit online I purchased a new pair of Nikon 8-24 power zoom Travelite V's. They have excellent optics and are mid-sized and comfortable to use.

I also bought a book on the weekend. Yes that's right, a book. I think it's been two years since I read my last book. Anyway, it's Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. I finished reading it yesterday, it was fascinating and detailed. There were a lot of references and themes that I could identify with; hacking, Bond-style spying, coffee references everywhere, Bibendum (The Michelin Man), online footage and watermarking, plus something I'd never heard of before but was immediately enthralled by: the Curta. Now I want to buy one... but they can be very expensive depending on condition and type (check on eBay if you're interested). To quickly summarise, a Curta is the smallest fully-mechanical calculator ever made, about the size of a large pepper grinder, or a hand grenade. They contain 605 separate parts in that tiny space! Beautiful creations. You can see a complete disassembly here.

Over the last three days and also on Thursday of last week, I've been teaching and acting as a "Hire an Expert" for a project, called "The Gifted and Talented Challenge", being run by my old school. They selected 14 students from schools in the region with excellent communications skills or other unique talents and put them in groups for a week to build multimedia presentations on various topics related to teenage life. Most of the students had no previous experience with multimedia programs such as Flash and Premiere, so my task was to introduce them to multimedia theory on the first day and then give them an uber-crash-course over the last three days. It was a lot of fun and the results were impressive, given the short development time and their initial lack of collective experience using graphics and video editing applications.

In totally unrelated news, my brother and his wife have sold their house and will be moving next weekend temporarily while their new house is built. After the last move, I'm not sure how much I want to be involved in this one! :P I seem to remember having to sweep out construction debris (highly dusty and dirty) while shifting furniture in the pouring rain at midnight. Sorry, you're on your own this time Justin ;)

A certainty seems the war with Iraq now, with only a few more hours until the expiration of the 48 hour deadline for Saddam to leave Iraq. I'm in support of the action as it seems like the only option left, but I hope they do what's required to have it over quickly. If Iraq is harbouring the weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological agents, that their intelligence suggests, now's the time when they are most likely to use them. Desert Storm II? We'll wait and see.

Things have disturbed my body clock in recent days, so a longer update will have to wait until tomorrow! (promise)

It's been two weeks since the last update, mainly due to not having any spare time to write one.

The LCDs arrived and worked flawlessly for about the first 10 minutes... then they started doing weird things, LOL (not a good sign for such expensive items, but it does help to have a sense of humour with such things). Basically they're showing up some rather strange random lines, or rather, blocks of the image copied from other parts of the current line. I tried isolating every possible cause without luck, so back to the supplier (in Brisbane) they went. And when they tried one there, it didn't do it :| So, back they came, but when I got them here, they started doing it again! So after another week of trying to isolate the problem (tested on other graphics cards, using DVI instead of VGA, different refresh rates, different computers, three different physical locations including another on a different power grid, with/without air conditioning and running them off a UPS purely driven from battery power) and seeking some professional advice (for the monitors, not my sanity ;) they were taken back to Brisbane again. Luckily this time, they did do it at the store. That's good because I think they thought I was just going crazy and imagining things. I also contacted Hitachi (it took many phone calls to get through to someone helpful - please see my entry of 2003-1-27 Monday for an idea of what I was up against) and they had no idea what could cause that kind of problem. It isn't interference or anything like that, it seems completely random, but they did say that they should just be replaced.

The saga continues, however. The store didn't buy them directly from Hitachi, but from another supplier (that buys from Hitachi). That means they can't simply send them back for replacements, they have to deal with their supplier (which may or may not want to just throw away $6000 worth of LCDs and try again, or which has their own RA process). To be honest, for that kind of money, I expect good cooperation. I'll have to wait and see how things pan out, though :)

More coding and more projects with interest from various organisations over the last few weeks. There has been a cold change the last few days, in particular the day before yesterday was quite chilly. I'm hoping for a long winter :)

My Office of Strategic Influence and Massive Attack CDs arrived yesterday; I'm listening to "100th Window" right now. OSI has me hooked, too.

In addition, I'm now the proud owner of a Galileo Thermometer that I stare at regularly throughout the day.

I could keep writing but there are more important things to be doing, namely, sleeping. I have to wake up early tomorrow to meet with a friend of mine regarding a project I'll be helping with in about a week's time. Good night, another large update will follow :)