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Shoulder Angel

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I was thinking of a padded cell, with a black-and-white TV to stop us from getting lonely... [Oct. 28th, 2007|10:09 pm]
[Tags|, , , , , , ]
[mood | busy]
[music |Mean To Me, Crowded House]

Raz, one of the founding members of ProgSoc, is in town this weekend to attend a high school reunion. He officially 'lives' in London, but is currently based out of Singapore.

So, to celebrate and whatever else, he organised a drop-in dinner last night at Red Oak. Given that he and Dad always got on well, I dragged my parents along.

I took a look at the price tags and meals on the menu, and organised to grab some food beforehand with Chris. We got Hungry Jack's on the walk over. My order confused the Hell out of the people behind the counter again. *shakes head*

On the table, we ended up having: Chris, myself, Dad, Mum, Kathy, David, Nathan, Ros, Raz, John, and Myles.

John was being surprisingly civil; I think his being sober helped in that. He kept trying to buy drinks and/or food for Chris and me.

However...
John: I haven't decided who I'll vote for. It'll probably be John; I don't want to be the one to kick him out. And he hasn't really done anything wrong, has he?
Mm: Children overboard?
John: ...Oh yeah. I forgot about that. That was kind of bad, wasn't it?
Mm: "There will never be a GST"?
John: But isn't a GST a good idea?
Mm: VSU?
John: He cancelled that, did he?
Chris: No, he introduced it.
John: What is it?
Mm: The thing that's cutting down the amount of money ProgSoc's receiving because no-one's paying their Union membership.
John: ...Oh...
Mm: Refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol?
John: But that wasn't his fault!
Mm: ..."Core" vs "Non-core" promises?
On the GST issue: I don't really care either way about the GST itself. While I fundamentally disagree with most of what Howard says, in some ways, it's more the "Oh, that's inconvenient, so I'm going to forget I ever said it" that worries me more than his policies.

Anyway, at around 9:15, Chris and I caught a bus back to Uni to say Hi to EGG and the Anime club; it was the Anime club Halloween party, so all of EGG were there. :P.

We hung around there for a while, then headed over to Railway Square. I just missed a 437. Sigh. When I finally got on the 438, it turned out ot be the same bus that both my parents and David and Kathy had ended up catching. Which was random, since they'd got on at separate stops, but whatever.

Got home, failed to crash till late.


This morning was dog training, then I caught a bus in to Uni. Chris had intended on coming in as well, but ended up crashing in a heap. Whatever.

I got a reasonable amount of work done; more or less as much as I was intending to. Perhaps a little bit less.

My week is allocated like this:
Sunday afternoon, Monday all day: SDP System Construction "Management" document
Tuesday all day, Wednesday morning: Work
Wednesday afternoon, Thursday all day: IAJ report (which I already have a page or so of)

...Fun fun fun.
-Mmaster
linkBe an Angel

Just so slightly ironic that it goes completely over your head... [Oct. 28th, 2007|03:34 pm]
[Tags|, , , , , , , , ]
[mood | amused]
[music |I'm A Genius, John Frazier]

We apparently have an 'indented' audience for one of our documents.
-Mmaster

EDIT: Is it bad that I'm tempted to start writing about Interpretive Dance as an alternative method for "Document an implementation plan"? I mean, what the Hell am I supposed to say for that?
Task 7: Document an Implementation Plan
Candidate Technique: Interpretive Dance
Description: The steps required for implementation are elicited, before being converted to an interpretive dance performed by team members on presentation day.
Reason for non-use: No-one in the team is a particularly skilled choreographer. Lack of permanency, accompanied by difficulty of conversion to paper form. Blatant insanity of idea.
link

[Oct. 27th, 2007|03:33 pm]
[Tags|, , , , , , , ]
[mood | irritated]
[music |She's Got My Number, Semisonic]

I can't tell whether Microsoft Word, or Tristian, is the greater failure in this scenario.

( Read more... )


MS Word was using all of the CPU I'd let it have, yet only around 20,000K memory - and it wasn't doing anything.

Tristian needs more RAM, and I've acknowledged this before, but I don't think it was his fault this time. I could alt-tab to FireFox and stuff quite happily, it was just Word that threw a spaz. Sigh.
-Mmaster
linkBe an Angel

Okay, I might be a little overtired. But why am I supposed to care about this subject? [Oct. 27th, 2007|01:48 pm]
[Tags|, , , , ]
[mood | frustrated]
[music |All Fired Up, Interpol]

*stares blankly at partially filled document*

Why don't they believe me when I tell them I'm terrible at making stuff up?

*fury*

-Mmaster
link7 Divine Judgements|Be an Angel

[Oct. 21st, 2007|06:22 pm]
[Tags|, , , , , , , , ]
[mood | busy]
[music |Your Spirits Alive, Dropkick Murphys]

ARGH.

I hate what Outlook does to emails.

I've been creating a semi-clean email file, in order to test some stuff with the IAJ program.

The things that take the most scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll to delete are Feedblitz emails (Why the Hell are they binary? RSS feeds are pure HTML!); followed by all the auto-generated "Making it pretty!" formatting created by Outlook users. Why do we need, like, three different copies of the same email? Your text is not interesting enough to justify having the plain text version plus the HTML version plus the HTML formatting plus (what I'm assuming is) a binary version. Dude, what?


Now I need to figure out how to get the information directly from email, so I don't have to sit here and labouriously add each email individually myself. Probably something like | iaj/filter.pl in the .forward, accompanied by code like this, correct?


Dammit, I should be heading home. Oops.
-Mmaster

EDIT: No, I think it is probably actually | perl /home/mmaster/iaj/filter.pl. Now to wait for an email to come in, so I can test my hypothesis. I literally missed the last one by a matter of seconds. *pouts*
linkBe an Angel

I'm trying to decide whether it needs some more random functionality before I write the report. [Oct. 21st, 2007|04:06 pm]
[Tags|, , , , , ]
[mood | accomplished]
[music |Rest My Chemistry, Interpol]

It now tells you off if you try and quote yourself. Can anyone see the level of emails suddenly going down? :D!


It also doesn't bother to store the email if it isn't actually to the list. However, it does this a little inefficiently; it reads through the entire email (Extracting the 'to:', 'cc:', and 'from:') before making any decisions about whether it's worth actually reading; there is one exception, which is the above "Quoting yourself" scenario (that is decided during the initial run through).


Glee!
-Mmaster
linkBe an Angel

'Course, I think Tristian might be due for a reinstall regardless... [Oct. 13th, 2007|10:06 pm]
[Tags|, , , , , , , ]
[mood | frustrated]
[music |A Match Made In Texas, Her Space Holiday]

I'd never really twigged to how much faster Connor is than Tristian.

I mean, I knew that Connor had roughly twice the RAM. But the point was, I don't think I'd ever sat the two down next two each other and tried to perform the same task.

Well, admittedly, I didn't do precisely that this time, either. However, I came closer to doing so than previously.

I installed NetBeans to Tristian the other day. I don't think I'm lying when I say it took roughly an hour to finish the installation (I don't remember precisely). Running it on him is, I've decided, more or less a lost cause; if you happen to alt-tab away from the program, you're waiting five minutes or more for the screen elements to come back after you return.

Connor, however? Two minute installation, one minute program load, and relatively instantaneous responsiveness.

Now I just need to not get distracted by the Internet while trying to work. 7PM deadline with an undefined task. Fun fun fun.

-Mmaster
link

Um... What? [Oct. 6th, 2007|03:17 pm]
[Tags|, , , , ]
[mood | confused]
[music |Some track from Chris' laptop; sounds like it's R.E.M.]

Email from one of my SDP teammates:
btw, so do we need to do all 15 points of 12?
That's the entire text, aside from the copious other quoted emails he didn't delete.

...Huh?
-Mmaster
linkBe an Angel

Don't fly fast; oh pilot, can't you help me, can't you make this last? [Aug. 25th, 2007|08:36 pm]
[Tags|, , , , , , , ]
[mood | tired]
[music |Dark Blue, Jack's Mannequin]

That's how foggy it was at just before eight o'clock this morning, when I was waiting for the bus to turn up. What the Hell? Fog in Sydney?

So yeah. Today was spent manning a stall to "represent student life" at UTS Info Day: "Yes, Year 11s! You should come to UTS, so you can join our club!" Or, in reality: "Yes, FIT, we still love you!" It felt as pointless as it always does, but we got one guy that sounded like he'd sign himself up to the mailing list - and sign up next year, assuming he winds up at UTS. Which I suppose is a victory.

Tristian was the only machine that could get a semi-consistent 'net connection, so Chris in a fit of boredom hooked it up to the switch so he (and, later, Adam) could leech my bandwidth. *eyeroll* Marauder swung past and kept us company for a while.

"Coincidentally", Bar Camp Sydney happened to be on the same day. So we had lots of random people admiring the motherboard that Chris got down from the decorations. And Blondie, who I haven't seen in longer than ages, was attending. So I invited him to my birthday party :P. At the end of it, one of the organisers took a ProgSoc brouchure, muttering something about 'Sponsorship'; but which direction she was suggesting, I'm not sure. I told her to email PSExec about it. But because of the event, Myles, CK, Ros and Nathan were all sighted - plus Myles' friend that I can't think of the name of (Looking it up, it appears to be "Steve", but I may be wrong in that). Marauder went and wrote himself a name-badge and attended as well, since he was there.

Adrenaline and free Coke was more or less all that kept me going until we'd packed up, then I collapsed in a heap. As we packed up, I managed to stab my finger with the scissors on my knife in such a way as to now have a pair of matching pinpricks on the first and second segments - though fortunately, they seem to have more or less hidden themselves by now.

Mm is sleeeeepy...
-Mmaster
link

You look so beautiful, it hurts me slightly... [Aug. 25th, 2007|12:56 pm]
[Tags|, , , , ]
[mood | amused]
[music |Twenty Two, The Lucksmtihs]

Kris: It feels like I have five of Adam's nipples on my back!
Adam: Have you even gone near my nipples?

-Mmaster

EDIT:
*The time's about 3PM
Nora: I should go eat breakfast.
Mm: See, Chris? I'm not that bad...
Chris: Yes, you are.
Mm: But I normally eat breakfast at a reasonable hour...
Chris: But you have done it before...
Mm: But I don't do it regularly...
link2 Divine Judgements|Be an Angel

All these things your saw in your pyjamas are a long-term forecast for your farmers... [Jul. 7th, 2007|09:09 pm]
[Tags|, , , , , , , , , ]
[mood | sleepy]
[music |Go Go Go Joseph, Joseph And The Technicolor Dreamcoat]

Today was good.

Lazed around in the morning.

Listened to Joseph And The Technicolor Dreamcoat, which I haven't listened to in like five years. Remembered almost all the lyrics, and realised I'd been misinterpreting what was said on a couple of lines. I really need to convert that tape to MP3. *edits To Do list*
* Watch Doctor Who
* Watch Spicks & Specks
* Read PC Authority
* Read the SIGCE journal
* Read River of Blue Fire
* Play some more Zelda; yay boss fight (argh)
* Relearn Java (Somewhat. Yay simplistic.)
* Maybe learn PHP/ASP
* Write Chris.exe
* Convert Joseph And The Technicolor Dreamcoat to MP3

When the tape finished, I packed up and headed in to Uni.

When I got there, it turned out that the Smash tourney had been re-scheduled to tomorrow. But the LAN was still on, so I dragged out Tristian and tinkered. He certainly doesn't have the capacity for games, but I had my external hard drive - yay stealing random files.

I enjoyed it, but by around 4 o'clock the noise was starting to get to me and I was zoning out seriously. I stuck around till about 5 o'clock, before heading out. (I forgot to pay my share, but I'll probably be heading back tomorrow afternoon after dog training.)

I hung around in the ProgSoc room for a while, catching up on RSS feeds and reading LiveJournal (I forgot to check Image Heavy emails, but I can do that tomorrow I suppose), then headed home.


When I got home, I spent some time tinkering with the loungeroom stereo set up. My mother got a new computer the other day, which came with a 4.1 speaker set; unfortunately, she has so little interest in sound for her computer that even stereo is kind of excessive. So we had this massive speaker set and no real use for it. Thus, my mother had amitions of getting rid of the massive (and awkward) speakers in the lounge room, replacing them with something easier to maneuvre. However, none of the components are compatible with multi-channel sound (what comes of buying the cheapest available in each category, I suppose).

But today, there was this gadget that the guys were passing around - three headphone jacks one side, two RCA jacks the other.
Mm: Where'd you get that, do you know?
E.G.G. Chris: Um... The XBox, maybe?
Mm: Brinton? Do you know?
Brinton: Why? Do you want it?
Mm: Yes.
*Brinton plonks it into Mm's hand
Brinton: I don't know what that does, but... Three to two?
Mm: That's all right; I'm not sure either. But if it does what I think it does, it'll be perfect.
Brinton ...Okay.

So, I hooked the headphone jacks to the speakers and the RCA jacks to the DVD Recorder. And sound came out of five speakers. :D! *feels accomplished*


And I'm now sleepy again. I hope that those three cans of Coke don't keep me awake - I've been getting to bed at one o'clock, which is probably why I've been zoning out.
-Mmaster
link

Words of a drunk fade with the light; Satan delivers, and the goods are all right... [Jul. 1st, 2007|09:36 pm]
[Tags|, , , , ]
[mood | bitchy]
[music |I Will Not Go Quietly (Duffy's Song), The Whitlams]

This evening feels like "Stupid comments anonymous", except that they aren't really that stupid, I'm just in a bad mood.


I don't know why I'm in a bad mood, since I had a nice day:

Dog training in the morning, and the first week with no rain in quite some time.

Lunch.

Then I caught a bus into the city to go to the ABC Open Day. To put it bluntly, I was the wrong audience for most of it, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
I ran into a bunch of people I knew: the father of a boy I went to primary school with, the head of science at my high school (and her husband), my Net2 tutor. I think I'm forgetting someone. Oh, yes: Ronnie passed by; twice, even.
I collected autographs of the people that my parents were fans of. My favourites weren't really represented, except at a distance.
Some of the music was good, though I plugged my fingers into my ears to block out the bass. James O'Lochlan is a lot less funny than he thinks he is. The choices of sides for the debate were bizarre: Kerry O'Brien arguing that music was more important than interviews? Youth Group, the headliners, were good - I think they had a four track set, and I knew two of the songs well enough to sing along.
At the end, I watched the crowd drift away and was reminded of that scene in Ocean's Eleven where the guys are watching the fountain, and then they gradually peel off and leave.

I hung around in the CompSoc room for an hour or so, skimming a few days' worth of RSS feeds and downloading some files. Then I headed home.

...Wheee... Party on...
-Mmaster
link2 Divine Judgements|Be an Angel

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