I have always like small cars. I can appreciate large cars but my personal preference is to buy small. My old car was also a small car. I enjoy not paying ridiculous amounts of money for insurance and road registration. I don’t use my car for anything but driving around, and rarely long distances, so large cars aren’t a necessary part of my lifestyle. I’m also relatively average height, so seating/roof height/footwells etc in small cars are rarely too small for me.

The Fiesta XR4 (or Fiesta ST as it is known in the UK) is special because it has a 2.0-litre engine from its big brother, the Ford Focus. Not only that but the engine has been tuned to provide more power (110Kw) and a better torque band (190Nm) which kicks in from around 3300RPM. The car also has sports suspension, a five-speed manual transmission, wide grippy tyres, a subtle bodykit and – if you are so inclined – racing stripes from the factory.

I first saw this car on an ancient episode of Top Gear – around 2005 or so – and was unimpressed to note the car wouldn’t be available in Australia until 2006. I researched it over and over and over until I had memorized every little detail about the car. I even took one for a test drive from a dealer. I was pretty much in love with this car (though not to the point that I actually made love to it). However, at the time I was still a uni student, and although I was working full time it was in a dead-end job. I could’ve technically afforded to buy it with all the on-road costs and a drive-away price around $28,000, but I would’ve had absolutely zero money to spend after that.

I watched the prices of them on the second-hand market over the next few years, all the while willing my current car to die so I would have an excuse to buy one. In the end, my old Nissan never really died. It is disabled but it’s not dead, but now it’s at a point where the cost to fix it would be worth more than the value of the car, so it makes financial sense. Plus Carly needs a car to drive to work in, and I just got a raise. So it was time.

I went searching and I was impressed when I saw this for sale:

As you can see it has stripes, though they aren’t ridiculous fat slug trails from front to back. It also has some nice white wheels. Aside from that this car had done about 48,000 kilometres and was going for a price I couldn’t refuse: $15,990. The only problem was that it was coming up to Christmas (the weekend before) and the car was in Sydney. I had organised the loan the week before so the cash was sitting in my bank account ready to go. I just had to organise the purchase. It was an experience in quick-thinking logistics to sortthe flight, accomodation, legal papers, etc etc.

I had my aunt and uncle living in Sydney inspect the car for me and they gave me the thumbs-up, so it was ‘all systems go’ on the plan. Carly and I flew down to Sydney on the Saturday afternoon (5PM flight) and were picked up by the seller in the car from the airport. We drove back to his house and did all the paperwork and exchanged the cash (he wanted cash to buy a replacement car the next day), went to his parents place to pick up the stock wheels and tyres, and everything was a done deal by around 8PM that evening. We waited on the road side while I waited on the phone for the insurance to be instated and away we went.

We stopped off at Carly’s sisters place in Mona Vale for a visit, then drove on to Newcastle. We arrived in Newcastle around 2AM and stayed the night, then took the inland route to Brisbane through Glen Ines etc. We arrived home at around 7.30PM that evening and were well-pleased with our accomplishments! The car performed brilliantly for the journey and never skipped a beat. Although the low-profile tyres and sports suspension sometimes proved to be uncomfortable over the old country roads, the journey was otherwise comfortable and stress-free.

I am now thinking about what extra bits and bobs I can buy for it. I am not sure if I want to modify anything; cars are a more huge money hole than any hobby I’ve had before. I am looking though at getting a cat-back exhaust, or perhaps a full system including extractors, as well as a cold air intake. That’ll be about it though for performance mods as I don’t want to put the car too far out of spec. for the purposes of keeping it drivable for the long term. Cosmetic mods I’m considering are replacing the LEDs on the dashboard from green to white, upgrading the stereo, and maybe replacing the exterior plastics with carbon-fibre look-alikes. Not because I like the look of carbon fibre, but because they’re darker in colour and enameled, so they should last longer.

Another cool toy which I am thinking about getting is a Bluetooth ODB plugin. It connects to the diagnostic computer interface of the car and then you can pair it to your phone. With the aid of an app (Android or iOS), you can get real-time readouts of all the critical system parameters. Considering this requires zero modifications and costs around a hundred bucks, although it’s probably useless it’s still pretty freakin’ cool.

Today I purchased:

• Aqua One 2x24W “T8″ fluorescent lighting ($140, the most expensive part so far)
• Seachem biological stabliser; to combat “new tank syndrome”
• General purpose plant fertiliser/nutrients
• Three plants, of which I forget the names

I’m going to leave the tank sit for a week. I’m going to go to the fish shop today and buy… something. Although I purchased a biological stabliser to reduce the effects of new tank syndrome (tl;dr version: new tank syndrome is the lack of “good” bacteria in the tank which helps to cycle waste products from plants and fish to reusable products by the plants); I really should wait a while before introducing any fish to the tank. Though, if I buy a test kit from the fish shop and everything comes up good, I may as well go ahead and buy myself some fish today. Provided the water has cleared up, anyway.

As I’m in the middle of moving house, the tank is actually at my new place, so I will have to check with my new housemates if they’re able to feed any fish I buy.

Good thing his medic buddy is standing by!

Often this is all you see out of a sentry gun a mere quarter of a second before you turn into gibs.

This sniper had obviously just met with the ugly end of an explosive.

Heavy weapons guy plus narrow corridor plus Kritzkrieg = owned.

You dirty backstabber!

• Intel Core i7 920 (2.66Ghz, quad-core)
• Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58 chipset)
• G.Skill NQ 3x2Gb DDRIII @ 1333Mhz
• Gainward GTX285 1Gb
• Asus Xonar DX
• Western Digital “Green Power” 750Gb 7200RPM SATAII
• Antec P182

All up it cost me an amount you can figure out for yourself if you’re so inclined. I also had to buy a desk to put it on and a screen to use with it. Got myself a Benq G2400WD 24″ – my first “full HD” screen. Very nice screen for the price ($350-ish), I was expecting it to be pretty average, but surprisingly it is not. It only has tilt-adjust, not even height-adjust, but I’m not that tall anyway so the positioning is perfect for me.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about setting it up: I accidentally bought the wrong case initially. I could have sworn that my mate had an Antec P180 case, so I bought one as well. I didn’t realise however that I had mistakenly chosen the “mini” version and was in fact buying a microATX case which would not fit my full size ATX motherboard. Frantically, on a Saturday afternoon, I looked up the website of the retailer I bought it from to see if I could get a refund or return. It was 3.30PM and I knew they closed at 4PM. “Fuck!” I exclaimed as I read the return conditions; “a 20% restocking fee will be charged on unopened items only, opened items cannot be returned” – ridiculous terms, but not applicable to me as I had unfortunately opened the box in my haste to get leet computing powah active. So I jumped onto OCAU and posted a thread in the ‘For Sale’ forums – not half an hour later I had a buyer, and that evening he came and picked it up. Ah, OCAU, so useful sometimes.

Now however I was left with a leet computer without an appropriate leet case to put it in. No worries, I thought, I’ll build it on the desk and get Vista installed while I figure out my case issues. So I started that. Well, by ‘started’ I mean what I actually did was a social discovery process to find just where I could get myself a Vista x64 DVD. I did intend upon using my legitimate Home Premium key which I got with my laptop nearly a year ago. So I started looking in all the usual places you’d find proprietary software, the kind of place where you can obtain said software at little cost to yourself.

However, it was very slow. Apparently my internet karma was low that day and I wasn’t getting the download speeds I wanted. So I sought an alternative source, and that source came in the form of a friends’ Microsoft Technet subscription – access to all Windows operating systems and software. Of course, being Microsoft, you can’t just download an ISO. You have to use Internet Explorer and you have to install an ActiveX script and you have to use their special downloader. Which of course crashed at 91% of the download, late at night, and made me annoyed. Luckily though, my mate’s very understanding and he popped ’round again to input his credentials and get the download resumed.

Anyway, I still needed a case. Where the hell was I going to get a case on Sunday? Computer Alliance, that’s where. They are slightly more expensive than other stores, but most other stores typically don’t have any customer service and/or stock. I was pleasantly surprised when I called to ask about the case; not only did the salesman give me a few details about the case that I didn’t know, he also asked me about what I was going to put into it and made the recommendation that unless I was tidy with my cable management, large dual-slot video cards were sometimes a tight fit. This was relevant to my interests (guffaw!) because I have a large dual-slot video card. Moreover, when I arrived at the store I found it was pleasantly decorated, full of stock (and customers – lots of people need to buy computer bits on Sunday it seems) and also full of friendly staff!

So I had my case. I went home and finished the Vista installation, then dismantled my bits and pieces and started the fun part of building a computer: the hardware assembly. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as fun as it used to be. These days because everything only has one place, and also due to the relative simplicity of my system (CPU+RAM+motherboard already assembled, only things to insert/plug in were video card, two SATA cables and the front panel cables), and also due to the high standard of design that my Antec P182 was built to. Cable management is a breeze these days. No more huge power cables hanging about inside the case, no more large, wide IDE cables blocking airflow, and no more cases being thoughtlessly designed as a set of boxes inside a larger box.

The Antec P182 has plenty of reviews so you can check it out for yourself. I was really quite impressed by the thoughtfulness of the layout and what it enabled me to achieve in terms of airflow and cable management. My only critique is that some of the important plastics (fan cages) felt like they are quite poor quality and after removing and replacing one of the fan cages once, it was already showing signs of stress fractures.

So I spent half an hour or so installing everything into the case, then I fired it up and got ready to copy my games from my laptop. Because I hadn’t installed SP1 for Vista yet this took longer than expected as I had forgotten about the terrible Vista file transfer slowness. While the games were copying, I decided to install all my drivers. This took forever as expected. I also installed SP1, and Windows downloaded a bunch of updates in the background without asking me. Yeah, OK, whatever. I was doing that anyway.

Then I rebooted. It took 45 minutes to reboot. The logoff screen said ‘Installing update x of y, please do not turn of your machine …’ for a very long time. I can’t believe it takes that long to update a modern Windows operating system. I don’t care about who/what/where/when/why, but I do care about how long it took. And it took way too long.

Eventually it sorted itself out and I jumped into WoW. It looked pretty good with all the settings at ‘Ultra’ (newly released graphics option tier with the 3.1 patch), but I still only managed 15fps in Dalaran. I’m going to blame Blizzard’s game engine for this. Performance in low population areas and instances is astounding, and it looks pretty damn good for a five year old game.

Then I fired up Left 4 Dead once Steam finished sorting itself out and I was COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY. As I had been playing it (as mentioned earlier) on my laptop, the transition from 720×480 resolution with everything on LOW to 1920×1200 with everything on HIGH was astounding. Not only that, but I was framerate capped to 60 fps – the refresh rate of my LCD. Awesome! However, when playing multiplayer I’m currently experiencing huge packet loss and lag spikes – it seems to be related to the nearby train line: whenever a train comes by my window, the packet loss starts. It’s annoying because I’ve never experienced anything near as bad with any of the other WiFi devices in my house before. Sigh.

As I sit here writing this, Team Fortress 2, Unreal Tournament 3 and a bunch of other Steam titles are downloading. I can’t wait to try it out this evening!

Pictures coming soon…

So I wanted to set up something to solve this problem. It obviously had to be a little bit more complicated. It needed to have some kind of vague access control. So I did.

I pulled an old system (PII 300Mhz, 384Mb RAM, S3 Virge DX/3D, and a new addition: SoundBlaster Live! PCI) out from storage and put my favourite operating system on it. The install didn’t work out the first time because I stupidly let the automatic partitioner partition the drive; having only 3Gb in total, this left about 1.5Gb for each of / and /home, which unfortunately isn’t big enough to fit all the software I wanted to install. Round two, I manually created a /swap equal to RAM size and the rest for /.

Installed Arch fine. Installed XFCE4 — for speed. When running it was using an entire 80-ish Mb of RAM. As for how I planned on playing music, well… I installed my favourite audio player and a frontend for it: relaxx player which is a nice AJAXy web client for controlling mpd. This was the only part of the system which was slow: even running it in Midori, the slowness of the interpreted Java/script environment made the UI very molasses-like in response. It wasn’t too bad; maybe a quarter to half second of lag between operations.

The music playback itself never skipped a beat (literally); as mpd itself uses pretty much zero resources. The audio (mp3 mostly, but some FLAC) was streamed over our 100Mbit network from my desktop PC just fine.

What’s good about relaxx is that it has an admin login and a guest (non-authenticated users) operating mode, and you can specify what rights the non-admin user has by simply selecting their permissible operations from a list while logged in as admin. Essentially that meant I was able to specify the guest to only allow add to playlist and play. They could not stop, skip track, delete from the playlist, etc. Which worked out quite well because as I mentioned earlier: there’s always at least one clown who wants to play their favourite tracks from “Greatest Country Hits of the 60s” while everyone else is enjoying something a little less … shit.

The only feature I think is missing from a jukebox-like application such as relaxx is the ability to have multiple playlists as some kind of intelligent queuing system. As an example: before the party started I manually created a large list of desirable songs and set the play mode to shuffle. However, this isn’t the most ideal solution when it comes to allowing others to add their own music. The other extreme would have been to start with a blank playlist and let people add their own songs all night. I think this isn’t ideal because then you may run out of music, or one person who is particularly attentive might see fit to add many songs of their own liking in a row.

So, I think that an intelligent system whereby you may start out with a large playlist of your favourite tracks, but allowing others to add songs they like, is best. However, there would need to be something involved where you could configure the player to, for example, play a recently added track at least once every x minutes. So you know that when you add your favourite song, it will be played in amongst the existing playlist at least once within the next x minutes.

Another idea I had was the use of multiple playlists, each with their own weight. So you could have all your really fav songs in a series of weighted lists, and the chance that a song is played depends upon how much weight its containing playlist has. This way you could only allow people to add to the medium or low weight playlist which ensures their tracks are not played more often than those in the highest weight playlist, which you have setup yourself beforehand.

I imagine there could be many other uses for these kinds of intelligent playlist systems, and I don’t doubt that I am not the first one who has thought of this. Leave a comment to let me know what you think.

Saturday night, Carly, Brett, Jamie, Dave and my brother saw The Butterfly Effect at the Caloundra RSL. I have been there previously and the place was pretty dead. I mean, in terms of providing entertainment for young people. The only interesting thing there are the large displays of cool WWII memorabilia including all sorts of guns, scale models of ships and other paraphernalia. Anyway, aside from that the place sucks. Except for the venue to the side where we saw The Butterfly Effect. It’s large and high-tech; the lighting systems aren’t the best I’ve seen (that would be The Met) but they were still pretty good.

The Butterfly Effect were awesome. The support acts were really good too. Sleep Parade who remind me a little of Tool were the first act up, and they put on a good show, even though the crowd turnout at this point was rather poor. Next up were Trial Kennedy and they were even better. Their music had more of a punk/rock sound to it, but it was still pretty good.

Though, after all that, The Butterfly Effect simply blew me away. Even though at the time I had a severe headache and was tired from the night before, I was able to let myself go and get into the sounds. What I really appreciated about their act was that they sound live like they do on CD — ie, they can actually perform the music they create. Which is quite a feat if you have heard anything they’ve recently released. The vocalist really can hit those high notes — consistently. Plus the lightshow and their stage presence was just awesome.

Tonight, I’m sitting at a a friends place having beef stir-fry cooked for me, sipping my bourbon and Coke, and having a good old lol.

I have work tomorrow but that’s OK! It’s not shit work.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that for the last 12 months or so I’ve been wallowing a little in my own self-pity. There was an interesting story on Triple J’s hack programme Friday, about how kids — well, young adults — these days are stressed out to the max when it comes to making life decisions. Australia’s quite a well-off nation, and our high-school graduates are faced with so many choices because of this. Straight into work, tertiary education, travelling the world, dole bludging even. The comparison is made to the era of our parents whose career choices were extremely limited. A good example would be my own mother who finished school at the end of year ten, whose only marketable skills at the time saw her placed into any of the following roles: secretary, typist, or administrative assistant. Yeah, you see what I’m getting at?

These days, we have so much freedom in terms of choosing our career paths … it’s quite stressful. The point is made on the programme that it sounds spoilt, but the burden of choice is extremely taxing on our young minds, and it’s not an easy decision at all.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that I’ve never really know what I wanted to do. Parents and teachers always asked during high-school, and even before, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” — which I think stemmed from their own upbringing, and the mindset that you were destined for some arbitrary role in society of your limited choosing. They asked a question which wasn’t relevant to the children whom they were asking. In my case especially, as I’ve never really had any life goals.

I want to own a sports car, and I want to own a house one day. The time frames are pretty undetermined. Though these days I’m thinking more about those two goals, if you’d asked me about those things three years ago, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you. These things do take time.

So for the last twelve months or so I’ve been doing not much with my life. Just studying and working when I have to, and in my personal time, chillaxing. Which is fine, but I think I neglected my self-learning a little. I dropped out of the loop for a while. In hindsight, I can see that it was a good thing for me to have done. I was getting bored with it all, and I needed a change of pace. So I spent time with my girlfriend a lot, and more recently started wasting time playing World of Warcraft.

I don’t mean to say that I’m going to neglect my personal time now that I’ve re-energized myself. I’m going to devote more thought to my personal time so that the time I do spend on myself, and on others, is more worthwhile.

Work has picked up, though. Not my main job, that’s still pretty bland. I don’t care about finance so much. It’s remotely interesting, and I’ll pick up tidbits as I go along, but I won’t actively teach myself about it. My other job however has started off excellently. I’m my own business and I’m doing some research for a guy who does full IT system implementations for small businesses. The twist is that he does it using all open-source software. You know how much I love open-source.

So last Wednesday, my first time working for him, I spent some of the day researching ways to do unattended installations with Ubuntu Linux, and then I spent the rest of the day starting to implement our first revision of system we’re putting in place. I spent the entire day working on my laptop (Arch Linux), logged into his server (Ubuntu), using awesome open-source tools (Firefox, Tomboy Notes, vi, etc). It wasn’t restricting (licences). I didn’t have to learn to speak another language (Microsofteese). I wasn’t constantly worried about lack of documentation (third-parties).

So now even though I’m about to spend my Sunday fixing not one but two Windows PCs for friends and family, I’m not in that poor a mood. I’m going to fix one by installing Ubuntu on it and having all the Windows-only apps run in a virtual machine courtesy VirtualBox, and the other I’m charging for. So that balances out for me!

Anyway, the Ubuntu ISO has finished downloading, so I better get to it.

A headsup for some of you: there are a bunch of sweet gigs on over the coming months, and I’m inviting you to attend them with me.

First up is Birds of Tokyo, whom I don’t know much about, other than their frontman is the very same who leads the very entertaining and very awesome Karnivool. Although I haven’t seen either live, the latter’s full-length release, Themata, is a favourite in my collection. Anyway, check out The Birds’ MySpace for more on them. Date is September 5th, cost is $27.75., venue is The Arena.

Next up is heavy-metal favourites, and awkwardly-pronounced, Meshuggah. While I’m not particularly fanatic about their style of music, I can appreciate it in small doses. Let’s hope their performance on October 12th at The Arena isn’t too large a dose! (at a cost of $53.50 + booking fee)

Next up in the metal section (although arguably with less throat-destroying lyrical talent) we have Disturbed. I’ve listened to a lot of their stuff over and over and over, with their album 10,000 Fists taking a special place in my collection. They’re touring with old favourites P.O.D., the up-and-coming Behind Crimson Eyes, and Alterbridge. We can catch them at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on the 2nd of September at a cost of $89.65.

Changing genre completely, let’s think about Dukes of Windsor. They scored well with their hit The Others showing up in a remix on a recent Ministry of Sound album. You’ve heard it, and you liked it. Trust me. Anyway, they’re touring with the awesome Sneaky Sound System, and I reckon we’d be stupid not to miss their show at The Tivoli, on the August 16th, especially for a cost $53.50 (plus booking fee).

Keeping the electro/dance theme, though moving down in the popularity ranks, we’ve got a relatively unknown group by the name of Grafton Primary. They reached realtively huge popularity on TripleJ last year with the slightly nerdy but ultimately funny (and fun!) Relativity; and they’ve also created many awesome remixes of other popular artists, including remixing the tired and overplayed This Heart Attack by none other than Faker, which in my opinion is as good as the original, if not better. They’re supported by The E.L.F, who are busy doing lots of wierd things on their MySpace, and the first group I ever saw play live: Christopher Robin, whom are not the same you will find on MySpace. They’re a small two-piece electro pair who seem to occupy themselves more with drinking than playing music, but they’re oh so good at it! For a cost of $12 and a trip to the Valley, what more can you ask for? (at Rosie’s)

Second last on this by-no-means-ordered list, we have Canadian crackpots, haters of vowels and all-round funky dudes, MSTRKRFT. They’ve a few releases and a lot of remixes, and they’re all hella-sweet. Accompanied by Ajax and a few other DJs I’ve never heard of, we can catch them at The Arena on the 2nd of August for a cost of $35-$45 (plus booking fee).

Finally, we have two bands actually: PNAU and Operator Please; both huge on the Australian charts, with the former being a veteran of the dance scene and the latter barely out of highschool, you’ve no doubt heard tracks from both, with PNAU’s “Baby” featured on recent advertisements for milk, and Operator Please having many of their songs played on mainstream radio. We can indulge in their alternately funky and rocking sounds (quite a contrast) for only $44 (plus booking fee) at The Tivoli on the 7th of August.

So, if you’re interested in seeing any of these gigs with me, please let me know. Some of them have been on sale a while, and are due to sell out soon, so we need to get in quick! A comment, SMS, e-mail, phone call or face-to-face conversation are all good ways of engaging my attention.

If you want to find out more information about any of the gigs, you can check out the bands’ respective MySpace/websites, or you can visit the awesome Triple J gig guide, which helped me to compile this post.

My life basically consists of playing WoW, going to work, and hanging out on weekends. Except, on weekends where I don’t see much of Carly due to her own commitments, I tend to also do a lot of WoW playing on those occasions.

Seriously, I do play a lot of WoW, and I think I would say that I am highly interested in WoW, but not quite to the point of addiction. I play it mainly because I’ve finished all my exams, forever, and now I’m just being rebellious and doing ‘irresponsible’ things in my spare time for a change of pace from the work-study-work-study-work … et cetera rigmorole that has been my life for the last three or four years.

So last night I stayed up until about 4AM playing WoW; though that’s because I was helping others. You see, in WoW, unlike other online games, there is more of a real sense of community and so much more “niceness” between players. Unlike other, more openly competitive games, where the mixture of high-speed violence and young teens makes for a complete lack of intelligent conversation at any point during the game. At best, it’s people trashtalking. At worst, it’s people trashtalking with added racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and grossly inappropriate sexual content.

In WoW, players help each other because that’s what the game environment encourages people to do. Through the length of the game experience, the co-operative nature of many of the quests, raids and dungeons, and the fact that, like real life, players of different skill-sets rely on each other in order to get ahead, the community behind WoW is generally a lot more friendly than the highly-strung, trigger-finger aggro children that hang out playing shooters.

That’s not to say that all shooter-players are morons (I still play occassionaly, and I’m definitely not ) or that all WoW players are saints (sometimes high-level characters will draw high-level enemies onto low-level characters just for laughs), but generally speaking the communities are vastly in contrast to one another in terms of their attitudes towards others playing the same game.

So if you’re sick of being called a fucking dickhead bitch slut hacker poof in CS over the microphone by a 13-year-old boy whose voice hasn’t dropped and can count the number of pubes he has on one hand, and would like to see some nice things coming from the players you game with, then give WoW a try, and see if I’m wrong.