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

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

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.