Life has been happening 

So, it’s been yet another long span of time between this blog post and my last, but hey, I’ve been busy studying. OK, and also procrastinating, which this is in a way, but still. Stuff. I could semi-bore you with a rant, or detailed recounting of events of my life (wait a moment, isn’t that what blogs are typically for?), but I’m too lazy to actually bother to recall my life. Well, to talk, write or in some way present recollections of my life, but maybe some time in the future I will be more willing to actually spend the effort on that… Read more »

The future 

I really don’t know what to expect in the future. I remember thinking in Yr 5 that I would be a scientist, White lab coat and all. I guess that’s still possible, but I need to remember that not all scientists wear white lab coats (btw, Apple Inc. is rather ‘racist’, it keeps on capitalising White on my iPod, but not black. I just wanted to remind you all =P Although that probably stems from ‘White House’ more than anything… Stupid US centric ‘UK English’ dictionary), especially if I don’t plan on doing a chemistry or biology related course (i.e. a physics related course). But now I’m looking at Computer Engineering, which is an Engineering degree (engineers all claim that an engineering degree is awesome, as opposed to ‘science’ or ‘IT’ or others) as my choice for Uni. I was considering computer science for a while, but the heavy emphasis on team leadership training kinda made me dislike it. I’d rather be lead in a workplace than leading it. Less responsibility means that I can concentrate more on my work (although, if my job is a leadership role, then it would probably help to have leadership skill), for example with my web-design efforts. I work as a 1 man team for my website, and I only have myself to be responsible for and to. Also why I don’t get much done during school term, and all the web work ends up happening during he holidays, although that kinda shows I actually focus on my school work more during the term… Read more »

Another long gap 

So, it’s been another long gap between by blog posts, but I guess that Year 12 does that to you. Actually, I suppose any final year in secondary or tertiary study would do that to you. Anyways, today I’m posting this from school, because I have absolutely no exam on today during this trail HSC period. Why am I at school then, when I could be at home studying? How nice of you to ask =P Read more »

Long Time No See 

Well, last I checked, it was a rather long time ago that I last posted, so I’m sure you’re just DYING to know what’s going on. Yeah, right.

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.

Android 

Oh, how I would love to have an Andriod phone, even if it were only to sit along side my Symbian/Nokia S60 phone and iPod Touch running iOS 4.2.1 (can’t be bothered upgrading to 4.3.1 yet). And a Windows Phone 7 (yeah, it may be inferior to the other OSs I just mentioned there, with the exception of perhaps S60 because that’s one old system, but it’s still a viable phone OS) along with that (would love to see what Nokia is going to create for the future of their phones. The mock-up images they released looked awesome).

Read more »

Holidays, before Easter? 

Well, it’s the holidays again, the Australian English dictionary for Firefox hasn’t been updated yet, and most of you are still stuck in school =P

Regardless of that, I think now is the time to catch up on article reading, the pursuit of trivial knowledge and checking out and editing a heap of articles for the Baulko Bulletin. Oh, and going through the forums to read up on everything I may have missed, and making sure there’s nothing offensive on there that we have to deal with. Read more »

Exams 

Wow, haven’t blogged in a while. Preparing for these half-yearlies and major work for SDD has taken a lot of my time. Regardless, I’m gonna mention just a few quick things. Half my exams are done! Just Extension 1 Maths, Chemistry (almost as hard as English, at least for me) and Software Design and Development…

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… Read more »

Post more often 

Well, I’m gonna try and post more often, even if it’s about little things or just small posts, but I really lack the heart to talk about much. I like to keep to myself, or more accurately, I’m an introvert and I like listening to people rather than speaking out.

Don’t worry, I do speak out sometimes, just not a lot.

But right now, I’m impatiently waiting for Firefox 4 to come finishing testing and finally release. It’s going to be wonderfully better than Firefox 3.6, which was amazingly better than Firefox 2… But before that, there’s school work to get done, so now I shall return to revising a year’s worth of Maths which I barely remember and relearning the entire Yr 11 HSC Chemistry course (because I didn’t pay attention in class). Speaking of school subjects, I feel like dropping Music 2 because of a combination of reasons (advice from piano teacher based on experience from AMEB exams and his other students, my own experience and my mum’s advice from her quite recent days of studying at Uni and getting in the top 10 in her MRT course at USyd), however I also feel like dropping Chem (because I didn’t pay attention last year!! STUPID!!) and SDD (because the syllabus and the teacher annoys me greatly). But if I drop something, I’d only have 11 units, and I have to get signed consent from all the heads of departments regarding this (because my school strongly believes in you having 12 units as a safe minimum, and I understand their reasoning), and I really can’t be bothered with this. However, I also can’t see myself bothering with the immense amount of practise and work I need to do as well as I want in HSC Music 2…

Anyways, I’ll pray to God about it, and ask him what he believes is best. And continue to ask my teachers for their advice.

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

P.S. Now why did I type all that up?

OH GOODNESS ME! 

The NSW DET has got a contract for Adobe CS5 Master Suite and Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus!!!!!

I wonder if these are carried over from their standing contracts with Adobe and Microsoft, or if they’re new contracts based on the new software…

I know, because the new images on some of our school computers have them… I hope beyond hope that these were carried over from the previous contracts, because if not, the government just spent another few million on new software…

A while eh? 

Well, it’s been a while since I last did an actual blog post (from the beginning of the month I believe). In all honesty, not too much of interest has really happened since then. I’ve been going to school, having a relatively normal school year. I’ve been considering dropping Music 2 (advice from my Piano teacher has basically made up my mind: it’s almost pointless for me to ‘try’ to continue in Music 2 when I’m not really trying in the first place, especially when looking at my previous attempts at ‘trying’ in music exams… 8th Grade AMEB piano exam comes to mind), I’ve gone to the only 2 sessions of Soul Purpose this year, I’ve seen the Encore concert (OH MY GOODNESS!! I ENVY THAT FLUTE PLAYER’S SKILL SO MUCH!!! HE DEFINITELY DESERVES TO BE PERFORMING AT ENCORE!), and I’ve spent only 5 days at school in week 3 & 4 (aka, last two weeks) because of camp, excursions and swimming carnival.

My brother has acquired a few new games (MA15+ meant that I had to purchase them for him =] ) and secretly been playing them while my mum’s not home. I myself have been enjoying the last few days of my Star Trek Online subscription before I don’t have it to play on, and I get stuck back into work work work (in reality, I barely get a chance to play it any more =[ but I’d most certainly go and buy a lifetime subscription for it after my HSC! Great work Cryptic studios!), and yes, I’ve been playing a MMORPG, like people play World of Warcraft (WoW), but hey, I’ve played Runescape in the past (still touch it every so often), and that’s an MMORPG, one of the 1st free ones I’ll point out.

Now, I’ve lost track of what I was going to talk about. I’ll just start talking about UIs. For my SDD major work, due early next term (yeah, I’ve really got to start on that), I’m gonna be writing my first real useable program that isn’t a console screen… good luck to myself! And I’ve been wondering about my blog’s theme. There are a few things I should probably change about it… Oh, and I was also wondering about the ergonomics and usability of the LCARS OS from the original lot of Star Trek (ST:TNG onwards), what with it being all black screen with white/coloured text and coloured buttons with its funny layout methods (remembering that it was originally designed for a Sci-Fi tv show, and was meant to look like it worked on a technology way beyond the tech of the 1980′s when the show was made, and later 1990′s and early 2000′s, I guess it makes sense). Anyways, I’ve seen some very nice versions of it around the web, and I was interested in creating a mash-up of some of its features with current UI ideas/designs/techniques/norms for my blog design. Anyways, I can deal with that on my drawing boards (that is, my book in which I draw up my ideas).

Got to get back to work now!! Hope this blog post keeps you occupied for at least 1 minute!

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

About

Hiya! I'm Ant, an aussie Teen living out in Sydney, Australia (and BTW, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney is not a real address... yet), and welcome to my blog. Hopefully you're not a stalker =]

Aside from blogging, I also have made some attempts at website & WordPress Theme design (as seen by my blog!), so expect some weird things on this site sometimes

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