yaleman.org

Pureprofile‘s another one of those marketing companies where they send you something every so often when you fit their profile, and they give you cash or something else as a bonus for doing the survey. I’ve been a member for a while now, and fill out about one or two a month. Recently I was contacted regarding a program they are running for Australia Post to test how the mail system works and so forth. They send me a few things, and on certain days, I put them into the post box at the local post office. Easy!

So, it’s the end of the school year, and all the little school leavers are going off to party and so forth - my sister being one of them. I needed a weekend away, and my good mate Brian was going with them (as one of my sister’s friends is his girlfriend) so I decided to tag along.

The eleven of them are staying in a house down at South Golden Beach (I think I have the name right) - a little village community on the NSW North Coast that has a total population in the really small range. There’s some really beautiful beach, a couple of hundred houses, and that’s about it. Ocean Shores has a small corner store come post office come bottle shop, and we stocked up there on Saturday afternoon, and that was it.

Well, there’s a bit of a milestone, I finally restarted my linux desktop machine. There was something going a bit odd with Nautilus and Gnome lately, so I thought I would just kill X for a little while, then go back in and all would be fine. Oh no, after so long it decided that things weren’t all hunky-dory, and that the X server would lock the console display and not let me do anything.

Ok, so maybe I’m biased, but my sister looked absolutely beautiful tonight going to her year twelve formal. It was so great to see her smiling, she seemed to be truly happy for once, and looked like SHE thought she was beautiful, instead of just the rest of the world for once.

Anyway, enough of my gushing, there’s a gallery full of pictures to see!

Gallery was removed - lost the images somehow :S

Ok, I can’t remember if I’ve said about it here, but I’ve been having problems with one of my ISP’s - they are shitheads. We sent them a cheque, they cashed it on 02/09/05 and are still trying to track the payment so they can remove the debt from their account. We contacted them on 12/09/05 to clear it up, and they sent me to a debt collector at the end of September. Finally I’ve had enough, so I told them early last week that they had until Friday to resolve it and contact me, else I would contact the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman - basically the government oversight committee on telecommunications. I called them this morning, three days AFTER when I said I would contact the TIO, they screwed me around for a while and said that they were still chasing the payment.

So I’ve been going on about it for a little while - the fact that I had to either buy or make a cable to run from the megasquirt ECU to the Relay/breakout box. I was hoping to buy a cable from the states, since it would have included all the wiring I needed, shielded runs for the required wires, and save a lot of time. Since the two different companies in the states I’ve attempted to contact won’t reply to my emails, and there’s noone else to buy one from, I decided to take on the task of making my own.

I’m completely and utterly blown away after last night! I’ve been a fan of The Cat Empire ever since they started releasing tracks - their first album has been one of my favourites of all time. An amazingly energy-filled performance that lasted for two hours, and had the whole crowd screaming for more.

Every song they played was amazing, never the same as the “album version” - which is a great thing - with lots of improvisation, solos, and playing between the band members. With nine members on the stage, and two guests last night, it’s certainly a performance well worth seeing if they are in your area. Words can’t describe how fun it was!

More than kiki’s aparrently!

“Hot town, summer in the city Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty Been down, isn’t it a pity Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city…”_

One of my favourite songs of all time, just cruisy music coming from the time of the Vietnam war, it was the first thing that came to mind when I went for a smoke break today. It’s getting to that time of year that you’re wishing that air conditioned pants were an option for popular fashion. Summer last year was a soaking wet humidity fest, and this year it’s already working on showing us how bad it can be.

There are a variety of styles of programming, just like doing anything in this life. You can plan down to the nth degree, making sure that from the start, you know all the possible outcomes of each step in the program. This is how mission-critical programmers work, such as people designing software for NASA or anything that’s life-threatening. You can start a step back, with an algorithm, adding code and testing it as you go, and generally making things work, not knowing every possible outcome, but for generalities the code will work. Recent articles and past experience using their products have shown that this is how many major software developers, including Microsoft work. Then again, you could just throw code at an idea until you get something working, which will break often, requiring constant rewrites until it’s usable.