(Posted by BaRRaCUDa!!!)

Well today has been... Lets just say its been a day. Quite a bizzare mixture of good and bad really, I suppose I will start with the good.

My ADSL is finally connected, so no more irritating modem skwarks that continue to plague me despite the fact that I have turned to modem speaker off in control panel. Also I can actually view websites without having time to make dinner whilst I wait for it to load.

I appear to have found a roommate, This will cut my bills in half and as such I will have a lot more money to spend (hooray).

Im doing well at CSU

and now to the bad:

Centrelink are STILL muching me about, I moved out of home and quit my job around 3 months ago and they still havent started paying me, right now I am living off my credit card but I'd prefer to avoid doing this for too long.

My power steering had blown a seal. Doesnt sound all that terrible but It is going to cost in the order of $500 to fix. (sigh) TO be honest I think I may have brought it on myself, I have it a good solid whack when I was off-road today, but it if went that easily then it was bound to go soon anyway.

And now for the n00b.

My brother got rid of my admin priveledges on the BONG forums, to be honest I may have brought this on myself as well, but to be fair, Kelly and Kevin were being n00bs and they needed to be punished. The price I pay for trying to keep things interesting,...

But anyway onto other things;

Its amazing how quickly you adapt to things, when I first moved to Bathurst I marveled at how fabulous the roads and traffic around town were compared to what I was used to, however now that I have been here for around 2 months I have started to become just as frustrated and irritable on the road as I was in Penrith, only now I get irritated at much more minor hassles and delays. I dred to think how I will cope when I go back home during the holidays.

I really need to get a lounge, as much as a beanbag is fun and amusing, I need something that is more inclined towards the upright siting position, It is not easy to eat whilst lying on a beanbag in front of the TV, luckily the carpet here wasnt great to start with so I wont get in trouble with the landlord for making a mess of it.

I have a washing machine now, trouble is the catch on the door (or would you call it a hatch) that triggers the saftey feature which stops the machine has broken. Right now it is being held down with blu-tac but I will need to find a more permanent solution soon. I suppose I cant complain to much about a free washing machine though.

Well as much as writing crap to post on a website no-one ever reads is exciting, I have other things to do. Channel Clear.

(Posted by Koopsta)

what an interesting night i had indeed. driving up the mountain to see my friend matt on his birthday, and about two minutes along the M4, 1km before emu plains, i run into trouble.

a nice pop and a tear along a quarter of my tire


i was driving along, then the back of the car sinks and it gets a bit hard to control. i pulled over, luckily i brought my torch to read the map on the way, saw my tire in ruin, called the parents, and got busy getting the spare tire out, the car up on the jack, and started pulling off the tire. all at 9:30pm.

mum and dad arrive, we've got the electric pump ready, we put the spare tire on, and its flat, starts hissing as the pump is trying to play catchups :-( it does come as no surprise that the tire thats never been taken out of the back of the car since we bought it, would be no good.

dad drives my car slowly, with the wrecked tire back on. gets sick of it and pulls into a servo to get the spare-tire-in-a-can™ stuff. using the flat spare tire (this is getting confusing), we pumped it up with the foam, and it just got us home before the tire began to go flat again.

and the worst bit is... i've got to catch a train to work tomorrow :'-(
thankfully this happened tonight, and not tomorrow along parramatta road.

and i haven't made any special effort to annoy matt's girlfriend vicky lately, but this is a good one.... it was so much trouble getting my car home tonight, i wish it was a horse, so i could have just shot it and left it on the side of the road :-D

this here is a prime example of murphy's law kicking me where it hurts. you can't be prepared enough for a case of murphy's law.

anyone got any rants about things just not going right, then getting worse? i'm sure there's someone out there thats experienced something a whole lot worse than me!

(Posted by Dean)

South Park really hit the mark in this seasons episode "Two days before the day after tomorrow" and "Manbearpig", flagrantly parading the blind stupidity of many if not most of the populace. For those of use who attend uni, no doubt you will have noticed the unrelenting harassments of no doubt well intending individuals who are hell bent on informing you about whatever non-sense hyper-left slash green theory or philosophy the Sydney Morning Homosexual has printed that morning. Ironically this nature loving bonanza drives up the market price for brightly colored laser printer paper by nearly 10c a ream, giving Mr Tasmanian Farmer that little extra he was needing to gold plate his toilet.

Al Gore apparently is kindred to these young zealots, proved my his recent horror movie "An Inconvenient Truth". True i haven't actually seen it, but I'm not going to line Hoyts's pockets with my moolaa top watch something i know will be rubbish (as opposed to normal, when i pretend the movie I'm going to see might actually be good, but thats another story). So old Al has jumped on the bandwagon to try and 'make us aware' of global warming - as if we somehow aren't already. Which of course is another great opportunity for hippies to prattle on about the Kyoto Protocol, and how by letting developing countries pollute freely, we will save the world as our jobs all go overseas and at the same time, a chance to go on about how new work place laws are leavening everyone jobless - ignoring the all time low unemployment statistics... *hmm*.

That is an inconvenient truth, something the unions keep a lid on, but here is one very similar about global warming. This articles from the Uk Telegraph nicely outlines some 'Inconvenient Truths' which you don't hear much of, and by 'much' i mean you never do ever because it would mean the hippies wouldn't feel self righteous.

Climate chaos? Don't believe it

Interesting how random numbers can still produce the same graph as climate details, not to mention that the middle ages was 3c higher average temperature than now.

I wont try and regurgitate what Mr Monckton has discussed as i wont do it justice. But its certainly enlightening, helping you thing 'wow i just took those graphs for granted rather than actually looking into them' - that said i didnt read the explanations attached to the article! But they are there nonetheless.

Print it out on silly colored paper and hand it out around your campus.

(Posted by WhiteFox)

So what have I been up to in my gaming life? Not that there is alot of time for it during the HSC year but what I can fit in is what follows.
My views and opinions are my own personal ones, they don't represent anyone else but myself.

Starting with Demos!

The Demos I've been playing.

Joint Task Force

A very generic RTS. Had 2 levels for trial without so much as a damn tutorial. I think of it like a C&C revamped, with minor hero abilities that are particually usless. I didnt like the feel of this game and even after turning up the scroll speed of the mouse it still had issues of slowness. I had to roate the camera which I believe is stupid in any rts. A map should be made to play on one view without rotation. Very basic with some interesting features. Didnt catch me though.

Maelstrom

Forget this Demo in a moment. There is no tutorial, It dosnt look very good and is plain stupid. Its like a sub C&C game. Its worse than Joint Task Force. There was some serious issues with things such as the fact my tank got destroyed by 3 people with chainsaws...This obviously isnt possible in real life as the chainsaws would have lost all their teeth. But my mission was to deploy something and I didnt get a tutorial so I didnt know how! Like I said forget this game in a moment.

Bad Day LA

Don't get me started. This is a good Demo....for children. Its a cell shaded game with interesting aspects. Made by Amercan McGee it was interesting and had great potential with all these disasters happening in LA in 1 day. I was highly interested and you played the roll of an African American hobo with a severe attitude problem with smart remarks that made you smirk. The begining was good. Then it went downhill from there. The music in the game was object placed. I heard the music coming from cars, it was a cheery piece that was making fun of the moment of a plane crash. But the music dissappeard as I walked away...That annoyed me. And then zombies! and I could cure zombies with a fire extinguisher!? what is the world coming too. I died after much scripted talk and was sent back the beginning of the demo. Forget that.

Now that the crap demos are outta the way lets move on.

Just Cause

Got this today. And I'll be damned as to how awsomely fun this demo was. Think GTA on an island, like replacing the city with tropical and trees. But vamped up and crazy ass action. Put it this way you can go from a car, to bike to chopper to plane to boat and back to car without ever touching the ground. The game features an "action mode button" which enables you to jump from any thing to anything such as car to car and continue with constant action. Its like GTA and Mercenaries combined. It seems like its gonna be a very cool game. Its open ended and has alot of potential. Its also coming to the 360 but who cares about that....

Go get this demo, strongly suggested.

Moving along

Call of Juarez

Suggested through the fantastic amazing and super sexy FragFest forums http://forum.fragfest.com.au/ get here and post away. This is a western themed game. Now there was recently released a unmentional western game that was horrible...(GUN) and failed to live up to any expectation that anyone had of a decent western game. This my friends looks to be a revival of a Western themed game.
You 2 characters in this demo. One a gruff priest that has a blood thirsty passion for killin in gods name and a young indian dude who really isnt that interesting to me.

The game is an FPS and lives up to any expectation of a Western Themed shooter. You can kick out banisters, you have the old fashioned shoot outs on a western street, you have a concentration mode that makes everything slomo to take out multiply targets, you have a dueling system that is so much fun it wants to make you go have a real duel with a random stranger. *slaps glove across face*. Everything from the audio sound effects to the gameplay struck me as excellent. There is even a scene where you come into a western town with the classic tumble weeds and theres no one around like its a ghost town and the western themed music plays it. Really a beautiful scene not experienced much in any game.

Go get this for all your western themed goodness or even if you just wanted to be a cowboy or played cowboys and indians when you were younger.

Now Company of Heroes

Get ready for some serious rantage.

This game is a defining moment for all RTS's out there. Made by Relic the fine men and women who made the DoW:40k series which is an excellent series might I add. But unlike DoW its set in a WWII universe. And yes I can hear it now, "*whinge whinge* ww2 rts have always been crap blah blah blah" ok take my word on this. This game is the best thing that has ever  happend to RTS. It completely redefines stratagey on a RTS battlefields. Where to start.

Ok you can play as Axis or allies. Lucky for me I got a Beta Testing key. As well as now the single player demo. Its around look for it. As either force your infantry are your main bulk of force. They are everything for your army. In the game the map is devided into sectors. And there are 3 resources. Man power, munitions and fuel. Each used for differnt things. Man power being the main. Anyway each sector controls a resource. So logically you have to go and capture the flag of that sector. But it dosnt end there, you cant just run into the battlefield you have to control each sector between that supplying sector to gain the resources. Interesting hm? It opens up the possiblity for "cutting supply lines" which is excellent to destory your enemy.

As you play as well you gain exp points, these can be used for special abilites that over time with more experience points are used for bigger and better things. For upgrades as Infantry they can use off site artillary strikes and things as such as that. Its hard to explain and best experienced.

There is also the notion of defence. Once a flag is capped you must keep it. You have to build defences, bard ware, MG' nests and tanktraps just to name a few. You can practically control the way the enemies men go by making them go around things and when they turn a corner hit a MG nest. Its tactifully brilliant.

Over all this Beta/demo as well as the Singleplayer demo which lets you play 2 levels are amazing beyond belief. I love WW2 and I love it even more now. This Game will be my new love and it'll own at LAN's for multiplayer for a long time I hope to believe. Check it out as soon as humanly possible, it is the best thing ever made.

K now that thats off my chest heres some other stuff to check out

Brothers in Arms 3
Command and Conquer 3 (looking awsome)
Dark Messiah
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Bf2142
Supreme Commander.

All these games and Demos are worth looking at, at least at a glance, dont touch ones I told you not too. Trust me.


Good night..Sleep time.

(Posted by BaRRaCUDa!!!)

Well as some of you may know I have moved out to bathurst, and until I have sorted out my permanent living arrangements I am stuck on Dial-up, which is painfull at best, and at worst I feel the strong urge to pick up my computer and throw it through the window which is only held back by the fact that this isnt my house and it would be highly impolite of me to smash though someone elses window without asking them first.

I mean seriously, It's gotten to te point where I get excited when bittorrent hits 3k/s downloading. I mean sure i could go to the uni and tap into the wireless, but from some of the 2nd/3rd/4th year students they keep a pretty keen eye on the stuff people download and doing so could result in me getting into a great deal of trouble.

Then theres Telstra.... The guy im with Telstra Prepaid Home plus so I had to go out and get my own account to use the phone. One hour later I am still on the phone trying to get my account activated, Its an experience I can only relate to being dragged across a rough gravel road from a rope attached to particularly slow tractor. Also, the gravel road is covered in Vinegar.

Anyway Bathurst seems to be a nice town, the uni is small enough the be friendly and large enough to have lots of people to meet and good facilities. There is a small LAN group out here that are having an event on saturday so hopefully that will be fun.

(Posted by Dean)

Thats a really bad pun for the title i will admit, however it is no better than the stupid piece of bloatware called Nero.

I just downloaded the demo so i could 'trial' it - 125mb! (which *doesnt* include the yahoo toolbar which they want you to install) Obviously i cringed a little, but you have to admit that its a good burning application - so i pressed onwards. Running the install i found that Nero is like a bad guest at a party, bringing along its who graduating class and several visitors from spain - in the form of random unwanted applications for just about everything you can imagine. Infact i'm very suprised they didnt include a browser, given that it installed media player, a media server, two different music mixer slash editors, dvd transcoder, local filesystem searcher, tv recorder, help wizard, back up tool, phot wizard and a whole pile of little tools and then promptly tried to reassociate every file with them (fortunately it gave you the option to "uncheck all").

A quick visit to Add or Remove Programs, shows nero weighing in at 393megs. Nearly four hundred megs to burn a cd???? I went in and pruned very hard and got down to just nero bruning rom, nero express (doesnt seem removable) and some little associated tools and doco (although AoRP still shows ~400 megs worth).

Im just in shock as to how badly things are bloating out. People hassle OpenOffice for bloatage - they need to visit nero! Anyway so i just wanted to have a little rant about how stupidly large these things are getting, and how badly they are leaning unsuspecting people over then having their way with them.

On a side note, I updated my work machine to Office 2k3 today (we finally updated our licenses) and suprisingly, outlook is actually better as is office in general, than Office 2000. Things actually start faster as well - suprising for MS.

(Posted by kelwyn)

As the title may suggest, we got robbed today. Well, perhaps less that totally
Happened while I was out, though mum was at home in the backyard doing some hedging... they just walked,in grabbed a few armfuls of stuff and left.

This is far less the tragic incident than implied, (not because we're we're insured to the hilt ) but becuase we were pillaged by perhaps the least tech literate thieves to walk this here fair green earth.

We lost:
-a laptop: not just any laptop, a slender 2.9 kilogram pentium .8mhz with a gutsy 16mb of RAM, a 14kbps dial up modem card, and staggering 1 gig HDD. (note: they didnt take the charger, and it wont turn on unless its plugged in,as the battery hasnt held a charge for 3 years)
-a heap of dvds: not just any dvds, but mums anaesthetic textbook dvds, and all her diploma assignments, which she'd just bothered to get cases for
-some cd's: mostly classical
-the vcr: I dont need to point out how hilariously pointless that was
-a broken camcorder: they kindly left us with all the accessories
-a broken film camera
-a dvd player: no loss, we've got 3 more
-a jar of change that was on the kitchen bench: I tried pilfering that for bus money the other day, it contains around $5.00 in 5 cent pieces

And, the only thing that almost sorta hurts
- our digital camera: which is 5 years old now, has been playing up, only had a 16mb memory card in it, which is in some obscure and no longer supported format. Once agin, they left the charger and the obscure old usb cable it needs

Idiots.

(Posted by Dean)

I dont claim to be an expert by any means, but i have read a few books on small business marketing (internet and non-internet) in my endeavours with my LANparty event. So based on that reading plus my own experiences, here are some thoughts, in no particular order, on promoting the Perl Weekly Newsletter and really any other email newsletter. The reader is encouraged not to just use them as is, but to use them as a starting point for further ideas and experiments to find what works for you.

• Produce content worth reading. Aimed at newbies, intermediate and advanced perl coders. Addressing a variety of uses for perl. Obviously if the steaks are bad or they are always medium rare (yuck), no one is going to come to your steak house - the same with your newsletter.
• Make it as easy as possible to sign up, but be sure to use a confirmation email system.
• Make it as easy as possible to leave, because you always want to leave a good impression.
• Track the incoming hits to the newsletter website. For perl weekly, you will most likely want to use something that takes stats out of the web server logs as many people (including myself) either turn off or disable javascript, or use a webbrowser that doesnt support it. For other newsletters, free javascript based trackers will do fine. The idea is to then use this information to find where people are coming from, then tailor your efforts in the future around these valuable sites.
• Try and get mentioned on big name tech websites (or for non-perl newsletters, significant websites within your topic). Such as slashdot, linux.com, and lwn.net.
• Try to get mentioned on social media by well known persons in the perl community or the wider tech community (or other topic for non-perl newsletters)
• Encourage your subscribers to refer their friends and to post links to your content on their blogs, project websites, frequented forums, irc, social media accounts, conference talks etc. Try and make this as easy and simple as possible, though you shouldnt drown them in "Like this" type icons - the 3 or 4 most popular social media outlets will do just fine.
• Seek and encourage new contributers, then repeated contribution. Make contribution as easy as possible. Perhaps a web form where the person can send in a link to their blog, or via social media - preferably both. People get a buzz when their content is included and will tell all their friends.
• 'Customer of the week' type articles also give people a buzz and bring a human aspect to your content. In this case perhaps 'CPAN author of the week' with a short bio. You can build up a library of these and schedule them so you dont spend ages chasing people each week.
• Use a perl based list manager (this is Perl Weekly Specific) and make a noticable mention of it on the newsletter website. As otherwise you lose street cred. Sympa or Dada mail are both options.
• Come up with non-email subscription methods, like RSS. This also makes it easier for you to get syndicated and thereby gain greater readship.
• Push out mentions of your newsletter releases via social media. Do this automatically to save you time. Twitter and Identi.ca are both easily done. Perhaps make a module for the list manager and contribute it back to the project itself.
• Some people really like stats, major sports exploit this perverse addiction and you can to! Provide stats on (in the case of perl) things like weekly cpan contributions, most downloaded cpan modules, most active perltesters etc etc. This can be generated automatically, so is low cost+time content.
• Seek promotional opportunities where you can include a discount voucher code in your newsletter. This is very non-intrusive and makes your readers very happy. It also makes the promoter very happy as they get very targetted advertising, with a promotional cost that correlates 1:1 with sales. You can of course, seek to get a commission on sales using the revenue to run the newsletter (perl weekly is a personal project) or just pocket the money because you've earned it. In the case of a business, you would just add that to your normal takings.
• Hit the web and promote the newsletter the old fashioned way! Hit usenet and post polite invitations in relevant categories (dont forget to invite them to mention perl weekly in their blogs and websites). Go to freshmeat.net, find the top 20 most active perl projects, then go to their forums, email lists etc and politely invite them to join the list. You should acknowledge them in your newsletter to thank them, something like "Cool Perl Projects that have linked us:"

(Posted by Dean)

"Prominent sociologists note that a subtle but large-scale shift is quietly taking place in popular culture today. About 77 million Baby Boomers, who have shaped and dominated society since the mid 1960s, are approaching retirement. And their influence on art, music, fashion, business, politics—almost every category imaginable—is waning to a new generation most aptly called Gamers, those born after 1970 and raised on video games.

Gamers are very different from any generation that has come before them. And, with 90 million strong, organizations that don’t understand or acknowledge them run the risk of becoming increasingly isolated and irrelevant. Gamers and Boomers represent the two largest population segments that libraries serve. Designing content, access, collections, services and programs to meet the demands of both is a challenge but a growing necessity."

Check it out at http://www.oclc.org/news/publications/newsletters/oclc/2005/267/thebigbang.htm

And here is some speculation about Starcraft 2 http://www.blizzplanet.com/?action=news&id=893

(Posted by BaRRaCUDa!!!)

Ok so last Thursday's uni bar night was the most fun ever. The students association organised for the people at the foam party company to run an event, we had an awesome DJ and a giant foam cannon.

The dance floor was absolute chaos as large numbers of uni students in varying states of intoxication all smushed together to get as close to the foam cannon as they could,  combined with the fact that everyone was drenched and slippery with whatever chemical the foam was made from. Despite the crush it was actually very easy to get into the middle because everyone was drunk and slippery so you could just slide through the crowd.

All in all it was a fantastic night, i got home at 2amish, i wish i could have stayed longer but an early friday class beckoned. Hopefully there will be one again!!!

if someone is looking at organising an awesome night for a birthday or some such think then have a look at http://foamparty.com.au