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

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.

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