Well, regardless of that, I can probably say that school has been RELATIVELY uneventful. Last week I went to Sydney with other Music class students from school and we enjoyed the 2nd Meet the Music concert by the Sydney Symphony. I particularly enjoyed the Bartok piece, Concerto for Orchestra. But enough about that. A few weeks ago the Concert Band had the first workshop of the year. It was a Friday afternoon, straight after school, and it was tuition for each instrument group for a few hours before dinner (Pizza Mias for each individual, with some of us guys finishing off the girls’ pizzas), and then finally a Band rehearsal to finish off the night. It was an enjoyable afternoon/evening/night filled with us working hard to perfect our pieces for the upcoming competitions…

And then just yesterday, we had another one, similarly highly enjoyable, just shorter, because all it was this time was a
Band rehearsal. Oh, and a lovely sausage sizzle for dinner. We sounded pretty good, and the parents who were listening to us at the end of it liked it (or so they said). We probably have a good chance of taking on the private schools =]

At some point in the last couple of weeks, my software class was supposed to hand in a Major Work, and by hand in, I mean present it to the class (i.e. the teacher, and the three other members of the class) and talk about it as if we were trying to sell it to CEO’s (that idea of Mr B.’s didn’t work out quite so well). We got through half of one person’s before class ended, and then Mr B. went on the Yr 9 DoE camp… So we unofficially got a week and a half extension because of that and exams (plus timetabling, meaning a week and a half between the two presentations). So far we’ve managed approximately one presentation a lesson! When the teacher’s here, that is.

Speaking of exams, after the Mod B English listening assessment task (which was 10 minutes listening, 40 minutes essay. They just have to stick the essay in SOMEWHERE, don’t they?) on just this last Monday, I went with some people from ‘The Stoop’ to watch Thor (3D). I must say, of the few 3D movies I’ve seen in the last 3 or so years, they are definitely getting better at it. I remember the days when it was the cyan-magenta glasses. So darn annoying. Funnily enough, that’s almost what the RealD 3D system uses, except that the light is now polarised, not coloured (and most certainly not rapidly alternating like those annoying Active-shutter systems. Those give me headaches). Anyways, I doubt I’d be ever getting a 3D tv, and if I do, it’d probably be a auto-stereoscopic 3D tv, and when it’s cheaper.

And even further in this long post, I’ve already done some research into what build I’d use for my new computer (when I finally get the money to buy the hardware). And I must say, the research was both interesting and informative. Ah, how I like learning (easy stuff, that is. Hard stuff is annoying). Some of the questions I haven’t yet been able to have answered is “Is the stock CPU cooler provided by Intel any good on the Core i7?” or “Do I really have to calculate in a 10-20% capacitor ageing for my PSU, or is that just a rumour created by the manufacturers to make us buy their larger products more often?”. For the first one, because all you ever hear about is people overclocking their CPU, they all obviously use after market coolers, not the one provided. But I don’t want to overclock! What about the normal people?! I suppose the obvious answer to that is, yes it is sufficient for non-overclocking.

The second question, well, I’ve heard some talk from people on different forums around the Internet, and some of them have given some pretty strong evidence that it DOESN’T happen. A whole lot of them have had their PSUs for over 5 years, and they said that even if you calculate in a modest (according to the rumour/myth) 10% decrease a year, on 650Watt PSU you’d end up with only 383.8 Watts by the end of the 5th year (650*0.9*0.9*0.9*0.9*0.9 = 650*0.9^5 = 383.8185)!! Which is quite ridiculous, as these people were running the same power hungry setups on their PCs for the entire time, and if it had dropped THAT low, they’d notice (when you run your computer at say 550 Watts on a 650 Watt PSU, and it supposedly aged such that it only produced 500, let alone the 383.8 I calculated there, your computer would shut down automatically when it tried to use the full 550 it can do, as the 550 isn’t available! As that obviously hasn’t happened to people when they play their computer games, which are some of the most processor intensive things your computer can do, and hence would use a lot of power), and people’s computers certainly haven’t been shutting down because of power failure (typically it’s overheating that shuts down the computer, but that’s an entirely different issue). So, the only conclusion I could reach from that evidence (and the fact that my 5 year old computer is running off a 305 Watt PSU, and according to that theory it should be down to around 180 Watt output… And In still push the computer to the max and it doesn’t shutdown. And Dell would’t put an overly large PSU in when it could run fine off a smaller, cheaper one, so…

Anyways, I’m gonna stop writing now, because typing on my iPod is somewhat annoying. But before I go, I’ve managed to work out a modest build for my computer, and it only comes to $1439 without software. And Windows 7 Home Premium OEM only costs $99, so why PC makers charge you $120 for it is beyond me, let alone the price they charge for upgrading to Professional or Ultimate. I suppose they need to make their markup somewhere…

Anyways,
TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

P.S. The modest build I’ve got planned would cost around $2000 from a PC maker, not including the software they load on it (e.g. Win7, Norton, HP bloatware, etc.), so you can see how much I’m saving by building it myself.

Well, I haven’t really got much to say on these upcoming or past exams. I don’t really feel like saying much at all about anything really, except that Crysis 2 is AWESOME! Now I just need to finish it on every difficulty (that’s going to take a lot of time), and collect all the items, and then I’d have campaign 100% complete. Multi-player however, well, that’ll be hard as I don’t have Xbox Live Gold…

While I’m thinking of it, I’m annoyed at how everyone believes that the NBN’s optic fiber rollout is stupid. Ok, the cost of it, and the way that the government/NBN Co. wish to do the wholesale pricing and other things with it is stupid, but really, it is litterally the way of the future. That optical fibre cabling is much more robust that copper ever was or ever will be (considering the massive number of seperate ‘channels’ you can cram into a single optical fiber, and a bundle, which is what they’re installing in the ground, contains nearly a hundred or more seperate fibers, you can see that where you would’ve needed 200 copper cables, you can now use a single optical fiber, and still have like 99 fibers left over!) and people forget that optical fiber is what is currently joining all the schools, government buildings and really big businesses to ISPs, as well as all the telephone nodes (like the Kelliville interchange for me) are connected to via optical (all the local nodes connect to the interchange via optical, and interchanges connect to each other via bigger optical cabling, with very little of that wireless rubbish they teach in school, since optical doesn’t require attenuation like that, unless you’re trying to call someone in Bathurst, then they use wireless because it’s costly to get fibre across the mountains).

Anyway, Fibre (Fiber? Fibre? How’s it spelt?) To The Node (FTTN) is probably the most cost effective and sensible way to currently deliver the NBN, which is unfortunately not how they’re doing it… But when Malcom Turnbull says that Cisco showed him a ‘high quality’ video confrencing which they claimed ran off only 1.5Mbps and said that their competitors would require 6-8Mbps, he does realise that they’re streching the truth? Oh, wait, he’s a polition, of corse he has absolutely no idea what he’s saying. MY PHONE CAN DO ‘high-quality’ video confrencing at only 1.5Mbps!! THAT’S HOW FAST MOST PEOPLE’s 3G internet is, and you want to roll that out as an alternative to FTTH/FTTN?! You have absoultely no idea about the physiscs, let alone the logistics of what you’re proposing. Maybe you should get a physists and a technology expert to explain to you how the more people that use a wireless technology in an area, the more attenuation problems you get from interference, hence the stronger signal you’d need. And to get a stronger signal, you need either a bigger antenna (and get all the health people screaming at you as the energy goes off the safety guidlines) or move the antenna closer!! Which would mean you’d eventually see an antenna every 1KM instead of the larger approx 2KM radius we have now. Oh, and never trust what a company says to you. Cisco very well may have given him an demonstration of a high-quality video confrence, but did they mention the cost of the product, and how very few people would be able to afford it? Now try using your argument that the average person doesn’t need more than 12Mbps (I can use 12Mbps when streaming from Youtube alone!! Although, that is when I’m viewing 720p video).

Ah well, I’m gonna give up on this. I agree with the Liberals in that we should get the companies to roll out the network upgrades for us, but I don’t believe that any government backed scheme would ever get the companies to really effectively do it. They’d just take the money and do the least they can.

That was a long rant.

Can’t be bothered to say any more about anything else, except that we must all unite against Steven Conroy and his Great-Firewall-of-China-for-Australia idea of filtering the internet.

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

• Battery life: battery life reduced rather much. In just 3 hours the battery dropped 2 bars. I’ll be checking up on that though, just to see if it’s a fluke on my side
• Connectivity: well, now 3G internet doesn’t work, and Ovi store isn’t compatible =[

Otherwise, it seems to be a pretty good firmware. The version I’m using now is a lot better than the previous one I found (well, he did make that one nearly a year ago…). The settings all work, the effects are brilliant, the CPU speed seems like it’s actually working (still only 443MHz though), the framerate of apps has been increased, and it has a lot more features now… but despite all this, I feel uneasy, and the loss of 3G internet, and a shortened battery life, just adds to it. I guess the feeling comes from uncertainty and the fact that it’s new.

However, I’d love to have this custom firmware, or at least some of its features, in the stock firmware…. maybe I could cook up my own using this guys work?? Don’t really want to distribute it. All I want are a few of the features (more like some off the apps he added with it). Hmm…. might take a bit of experimenting, but I should be able to do that…

Anyways, I’m gonna get back to doing my software stuff =]

Oh, and the assignments are annoying me a lot. How have the older students put up with this?!

However, until then, I’m stuck with dial-up speed internet, courtesy of Telstra Bigpond (I wonder why Telstra & Optus don’t provide off-peak, and count up-loads as well as downloads, when their competitors, who have to buy data plans off them anyway, are willing to do that?). So, when I try going to my blog’s homepage, I realised how slow it was to load without broadband speed internet. I was considering what I should do to lessen the impact of the download times and stuff, but I couldn’t come up with much.

I mean, I’ve already tried reducing the quality and size of the images, the javascript and CSS has been minified as much as I can without having to resort to a program to minify it more (is there a program to do that?), and I’ve tried to leave as few files as possible. Although I guess I could find a way to cut down just a few kilobytes, it’s not gonna make much difference at all, it still takes forever to download the stuff for some reason.

I mean, using a simple 1×10 pixel image as a background for the sidebar buttons and getting them to be repeated to create a solid bar, you can’t get much smaller than that without forgoing the appeal of the image. I guess this is just a problem faced with modern websites which thrive on the broadband speed so common now with internet users with large downloads (maybe ignoring the majority of the mobile phone users still on older plans).

Regardless, I really don’t know why the browser is continuing to try and load portions of the page I’m on. The server connection has timed out whilst it was trying to load the info (although it hasn’t realised because some setting on the server probably let it have a really long timeout…)

And I’ve watched Alice in Wonderland (in 3D) twice now. I reckon, for a Tim Burton movie (he’s odd in my opinion, and I only like some of his movies), and for the extremely odd book, it was a good movie. I love the soundtrack. Must get a copy of the soundtrack…

Oh, I have many things I’d like to put up here for my blog, but I can’t be bothered right now. I’ll do it later, another day when I have better internet.

Anyways, I’m gonna post this now, and say:

Happy Easter Guys. Remember the real reason for this time: that Jesus came to Earth not just to do fancy miracles and impart good morals, but to take our place on the cross of spiritual life, so that we wouldn’t have to go to hell and pay for our sins.

TTFN, Ta Ta For Now!

Talking about indie, I was surprised to hear that one of the iPod Touch 1G ads was actually a buffed up Indie ad made buy a guy who posted it on YouTube. He had made his own version of an iPod ad, and the people at Apple like it so much that they contacted him to work with their advertising team to make a version for TV.