Hiatus

Just so people know, something is wrong with my wordpress.com account. I can’t post anymore until I get this fixed, so if there are any readers, you may have to hang out for a while.

My Holidays in 20 Seconds

Wow. So much has happened over the last few weeks it’s a blur. I’ll start from the top:
1. School finished. Holidays rule.
2.Parents quit smoking. Frigging awesome, they say every cigarette takes 5 minutes off your life
3. Christmas. Bonanza! The main present was the Wii, which with Wii Play, Wii Sports, NFS Carbon, and Legend of Zelda: TP, never ceases to disapoint. I still need to get a lan adapter so I can go on the internet, which in Australia, is harder than it sounds.
4. I saw Casino Royale today. Easily the best Bond film ever. 4.5/5 stars.
Well, that’s about it folks,
Chalkley3 Out!

Disappointments on the Port Bow!

Oh well, I haven’t update this thing for a while. Life is full of ups and downs at the moment, it’s altogether very bumpy. Well, Since my last post I’ve done a lot of cool things most memorable of which is going to the royal show. For people who have no clue what I’m talking about it’s this giant, carnival sort of thing that comes to Perth for 8 days a year starting around October. I think the original purpose was for farmers to show of their sheep ect. but now it’s this huge thing that occupied the entire Perth showgrounds (really close to our house) with all manner of things to do. I went with some friends and got to be the bag boy while they went on the Python Loop (huge ass rollercoaster) twice. The rides are pretty extortionate here as the average for a ride in sideshow alley is $8au. After feeling wimpy for 10 minutes I let them pressure me into going on the Mega Drop. Bad Idea. This thing is psycho. It takes you up 45 metres then in about .2 seconds it lets you drop all the way down at 204 km/h with a force of -5.5g. That would make you think that all the blood would rush to your head, but for me the opposite happened. I was so freaked out that my friends said I was as white as a ghost. After that we went on the splashdown (fun), Azzam and Sam blew five bucks on shooting cans with a cork gun (to no avail), buying about 5kg of lollies in showbags (pwnage) and then going home and having Azzam yelling at me because I wanted to buy a train ticket (illegal not to do so). The dairy pavilion they have there is quite awesome. Every stall has free samples, YoGo, icecream, cheese, flavored milk you name it, they have it. FOR FREE!

This week I also decided to undertake the horror of installing Vista RC1. To anyone considering this, DON’T. While it may be loaded up with eye candy, it’s a freakin unstable, slow, crashable, bsod inducing, incompatible bitch. After backing everything up I downloaded the ISO and started installing it, only to find halfway through the dvd was corrupt and I had to download the 2.5 gig image again. Big deal you might say, but on a 5gb download limit and with on 256k Internet, it is a big deal! Well, after a lot of fiddling around and a 5 hour install time (Yep, it looks like it’s frozen but it isn’t) I finally got it working. The logon screen is beautiful. Everything else, a work of art. But have you ever tried getting a Picasso to play DVDs? (bad metaphor, shutup) Not even all the fancy GUI tricks in the world would make me install a beta of this again. First of all:

~My neck hurts

~It’s really slow!

~It’s incompatible with my video drivers (a problem, since the vista ones from ATI don’t work with my outdated hardware. I get a BSOD every time I expand the navigation bar in the open/save box.This is something you need)

~I just realized while typing this that I put my ~ key back on upside down (WTF)

~It takes up 75% of my ram doing nothing (512mb)

~And… it’s just really freaking buggy.

My advice to you: Just don’t go there!

Adios, Chumps

Electric Boogaloo

I swear. If anyone even utters the words “car stereo” I will kill them. You wanna know why? Because today, as a fathers day present for my dad we thought we’d be nice and get him some 6″x9″ speakers for the back parcel shelf as the general consensus was that the stock Volvo (top of the range 14 years ago) speakers were lacking in the oomph department. We went to Strathfeild Car Audio and picked out some Sony Xplōd 3 ways. Since we don’t have an amp and the Sony deck can only support 4 channels we had to unplug the rear door speakers, and the dash tweeters (no biggy as you can’t hear them anyway) and wire the 6×9’s into the system. Simple enough? WRONG! We started out by trying to remove the shelf so we could cut out the hole for the speaker to sit in but that in itself turned into a drama. Turns out, that in a 940 the parcel shelf is actually bolted onto the body of the car behind the seats themselves. Note: if any Volvo engineers are reading please proceed to flagellate yourselves with a leather belt wrapped in barbed wire. So, a relatively simple task has now turned into a mammoth one involving removing the back seat completely (not easy) unscrewing the shelf and cutting holes in it. Well, after getting up to that bit we realize the bump for the centre seatbelt means the grill isn’t going to fit in properly. So, we go back to Strathfeild and the guy fixes us up with a different model with a smaller grill (bummer, cos the first ones were 300w and these ones are 220w. It doesn’t matter really though because our stereo only pumps 52w per channel and it could actually make it sound better. Still, numbers are cool)

Anyway… fast forward to about 3pm. We’ve gotten back and now we have to lay the wiring. We pull the carpet up (not easy either. You have to unsheathe the seatbelt pretensioners [Google it] which is dangerous because they are pretty fookin explosive [they were supposed to be removed last service but someone neglected to do it.]) and we find the whole floor is in at least half a centimeter of water. (how it got there I’ll never know) Unable to find the leak we ignore the puddle and lay the wiring. That was the only part that went smoothly (thanks to moi) meanwhile dad was cutting the holes (the grilles were still too big so we had to shave bits off them) for the speakers. The MDF the shelf was made out of decided it was going to be a crumply bastard today so we had to go to great pains to get the drill through without snapping the whole thing. Fast forward past that it was re-assembly time. Or as I like to call it, push and tighten things until they don’t move anymore and hope to bloody hell it doesn’t come loose and kill everyone. I even got to lie in the boot and fiddle with the wires, normally a privilege reserved for kidnap victims.

Well. It took 8 hours (seriously) and enough curse words to script another South Park movie but we made it and that’s the important thing. bitch

School… Oh Noez!

The winter holidays have finally come to an end. I got so much done, except none of it was stuff I wanted to do. I must admit, I spent the better part of my two weeks up a ladder helping Dad put polycarbonate sheeting up for our new pergola or on the roof pulling up tiles to put flashing underneath to stop leaks. I’m becoming quite the unplanned handyman. I still resent the fact that Dad insists on doing almost everything himself even though he has torn up cartilage in his knee. It kills him to do it and i’m seriously tired of watching him go around like he is Arnold Swartzinegger and than complaining he can’t walk or somthing like that. All things aside it was an interesting experience.

We also lashed out and bought a new lounge suite. This is very good since our old couch actually crunched every time you sat on it. Plus we have a gay pink chair that only has 3 wheels and is more brown than pink anymore. For a design-oriented guy like me it drives you insane. The good bit is that our new sofa is leather (unfortunately the crap el-cheapo type, not the nice natural semi-anilene stuff you see at the shops for 5 grand a chair).

I have New Super Mario Bros. on the brain. Understandable since I bought it at EB the pupil-free day before the holidays. I like it especially because is a faithful but innovative remake of the old classic that I grew up with. It brings back a lot of memorys because the first game I ever played (and the game that started my passion for gaming) was the Super Mario All Stars collection for the SNES. I also, on saturday, went to the Nintendo DS Connection tour at Garden City. That was awesome to go somewhere and actually find a game on WiFi or download play. I like it that Nintendo is finally starting to recognise Perth as an actual place on the map (apparently being the capital of Western Australia doesn’t mean much here…) and doing some stuff with us dudes on the west coast.

3 Days ago my dad bought a ViewSonic 19″ LCD with the money he made from taking photos. I don’t care because it’s on his computer but on the plus side i got his old Mag-View 19″ CRT. It’s geometetry is a bit crap though. I am now officially a deviantART subscriber and Beta tester. Wow! now if only i could figure out how to get a nice journal…

Sidenote: VistaFolders 2.0. The revolution amazing incredible… The… thing… that… is… coming

Cars, Holidays, a league of gentlemen, and a crazy Japanese guy

Ahhh. Sweet freedom. The school holidays came on friday and i’ve been living it up since. Actually, no I haven’t. I’ve been down with the sickness lately and I rekcon that bastard germ-monkey Azzam had something to do with it.

I finished Splinter-Cell Chaos Theory last week and that was pretty cool. The final level is awesome but the ending movie is a bit crap. I mean, you save the frikking world and all you get to see is Sam shooting a paper ball into a waste basket. The final part of Kokubo Shosho is really fun. General (SPOILERS!) Otomo goes kinda nuts and stabs himself after you catch him trying to cause World War 3. It kinda sucks because I want to play the co-op missions online but unless I have my game patched it won’t let me. That’s fine except for the fact that the patch breaks the computer. Oh well. It doesn’t really matter as it looks like my computer’s broken anyway (Does anybody have a problem where houses in the neighbourhood screen of sims 2 flash red?).

I also rented out The League of Gentlemen today and I recomend it to anyone who liked Little Briton or any stuff like that. It’s very sinister (Are you local?) and sometimes just plain weird. WATCH IT NOW OR I WILL DEVOUR YOUR SOUL!

And finally I saw the movie Cars today. Pixar FTW. ‘Nuff said

Día de la celebración

Sigh. It's getting near the end of term and the weeks are just dragging by. It seems that the days are getting longer and my somewhat blissful period of lazing about after school not doing any work is drawing to a close. The teachers at Shenton seem to be making up for lost time, probably because report time is coming up and they've got nothing to assess us on. I'm looking forward to next year though as I should be getting to choose some of my subjects (don't ever pick Japanese thinking it's easier than French ) and i'm looking forward to doing some computer assisted design and architecture stuff. My current T&E subject, Design & Technology, is fun and after using a scroll saw for the first time, I can tell you, making wooden toys unsupervised with a $600 finger-chopping death machine is really fun. The only really annoying thing about this year so far was that our new English teacher Mrs. Minuta (really nice, replaced Dianna van Straalen aka van Stalin, (side-note. The saying good things happen to bad people is true. How can such a manipulative bitch become the second most powerful education person in Australia? Actually I think I just answered my own question… But really, she is now Federal Policy Adviser to the Education Minister. May God help us all!) was sick for about 8 weeks out of a 20 week semester. So many weekends spent working hard as hell on assignments that never even got marked. The even more annoying thing is that after getting married in April, she's moving back to London with her new partner. I wonder who we'll get.

In other news to day was my Mum's birthday. It was pretty good. Yesterday we went out to lunch to celebrate and that was cool, and today we just had a barbecue in my family's backyard. I got her a bonsai tree and my brothers got her a book on how to care and shape it. My dad got her an A1 art folio to keep her paintings in. I think she really liked the presents because her two passions are art and gardening.

It's also the last week of the month and we've only used 1.3 gig of our 10 gig download limit for our ADSL account, meaning a bit-torrent party for me! I always buy CD's from artists I really like and yesterday I bought Stadium Arcadium. Talk about money well spent! This is definitely the RHCP greatest album ever. Even better than their "Greatest Hits" album. It was really good value too as it's a double album with 30 songs. That's pretty awesome as most bands are only releasing albums with 12 songs. Which brings me onto my next gripe: The iPod Shuffle. Don't get me wrong, it's a really good flash mp3 player and the problem isn't really with it, rather me. The thing is, to fit the advertised limit of 120 (give or take) songs you have to check the option allowing iTunes (god bless Apple) to convert every song above 128 kbps to 128 AAC to save space. The only problem is that I've only had my iPod for 3 months and every song I ripped before that is in at least 192 kbps MP3. The better way would be to convert my entire library to AAC so I only have to do it once, but when every song takes 4-5 minutes to convert plus the fact I'm worried about quality loss (not important on earbuds but really important for the computer) it's not really an option. The best solution would be to buy and iPod video but I don't have $500 lying around. (Sam does, that rich bastard).

Last but not least I submitted a picture I was playing around in photoshop to devART. I took it in the new East Perth redevelopment a few weeks ago. It's probably the best shot out of the bunch.

Check it out @ DeviantART

1000 Views…. Time To Parrr-Tay!

I wnet to check my deviantART account and was presented with this pretty cool screen. Very nice. Also, it's been up for 3 days and has already racked up 1,578 2127 downloads and counting…

Clicky for a full veiw!

Blogged with Flock

Headcrabs On Ye Port Bow!

Today after a couple of hours of fiddling I at long last managed to install the Half-Life 2 demo. My experiences from this is that steam is the reincarnation of satan and it eats babies. Seriously, that thing is a pain in the arse. You shouldn't have to spend 3 hours updating to run a demo you already had on DVD. Oh well, it was probably worth it anyway. I can't really experience the whole gamut of visual effects it has because of my crappy computer but it creates such an eerie atmosphere. The interactivity is great also. I spent at least half an hour throwing various things at combine troopers and watching with a twisted glee as they shocked the bejesus out of me with their batons.

The demo also comes with Ravenholm. This level is filled with headcrabs and zombies. On the other hand, it is filled with a whole manner of ways to kill them. Chopping traps, car traps and flame pits are only a few of the many ways you can dispense of these unpleasant foes without even firing a single bullet. My favourite is to pick up blades with the gravity gun and shoot them at ridiculously high speeds, chopping the buggers in half. It's like F.E.A.R but with less urine-soaked trousers.
I would definately buy this game if I had any money (read previous post). However, money seems to be the least of our problems here in Perth. According to the weather dudes it is the driest winter ever. It suck a bit. Anyway, things beckon so I need to go. I'll leave you with one last note though: Flock is a really good browser. Buggy (still in beta) but good. WINDOWS VISTA BETA 2 MAKES ME HAPPY.

Idiots Need Not Apply

Why does it seem like no matter how much money you have, you always run out?I don't get it. As far as I can tell there isn't a trans-dimensional wormhole in my wallet so where does all go? I've been trying to get a job for some time now as a paper delivery person ect. but all my friends have beaten me to the punch. I tried calling Western Suburbs Weekly the other day about an ad in the paper, but like all the other times you give them your details and get your hopes up and never call back.

In other news my Dad just recently bought a new SLR digital camera to satisfy his hobby and maybe make a few bucks in the process. He reckons he can take photos of his friend's paintings to send to galleries and such. Larry (the painter friend) is fed up with the pros that do his work and Dad thinks he can do it better and cheaper. The camera is pretty damn cool. I took some photos at East Perth and they turned out really good. It looks hella paparazi with the telephoto (big zoom) lens attached. The reason you are reading this is because I recently got broadband and I must say, boy have I been missing out on something.

Anyway this post should be the first of many, proving a convenient distraction from iminent homework. Next time on the Chalkley Channel: Angry ticks fire out of my nipples!