22
May

New hosting

Okay, so I’ve finally made the decision to not host my own stuff.

For the most part during the years, I’ve had a Freebsd catchall machine that served as most of what i needed. WWW/SMTP (antispam/antivirus) and various other things I’ve hosted such as subversion back when i was at Uni. Now that I’m really looking at something more stable and hassle-free, I’ve got the spare cashola to get something half decent and move it all off my home link. I’ve also decided to start slaving better connected primary/secondary DNS hosts to further decrease the reliance on my current single connection. So, for now - I have far less to worry about when I start moving machines around, and out. With luck I’ll have a flexible infrastructure in the end that i can manipulate as per situation demands it.

21
Apr

New Musics.

Okay, so now I have the majority of what is around for Mew. A little emo-ish at times, but still I’ve played through 3 albums this night and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve heard. And I like them. Which is a very snap decision but after hearing a sample at Mark’s housewarming on the weekend I figured I’d do a bit of a hunt and get what I can.

Enough to put into my stacker in the car. Which means at least a 3 or 4 week rotation till I find some more. Speaking of, I’m always after suggestions.

PS: I hate it when you’re right, Steph. *shake fist*

05
Mar

Auto Extension Tubes

This post is almost directly inspired by Neil’s post about those lovely devices that enable us to bring our photographic subjects much closer to us, and give us a much greater level of detail that we would normally think possible.

Along with my lovely new camera and lenses, I’ve acquired a set of auto extension tubes. These differ from the normal extension tubes such that they include the contacts and electronics to feed back lens information, and control data thus allowing for the camera to have a degree of auto focus - in the case of my Kenko auto extension tubes, when the aperture is f/5.6 or brighter. And of course by bringing our focus much closer to our lens, we’re able to effectively magnify our subjects without the use of a dedicated macro lens.

So, what real use do they have?

I found that the extension tubes worked wonderfully - auto focus was not a particularly handy thing, given I had a complete lighting setup available and thus was shooting with an aperture of around f/22. The lens and shooting information that the circuits carry are still very handy though. Sending back the aperture and lens information to store in the image EXIF data is great.


The lenses I have seem to be unable to focus with all 3 rings on - that’s a full 68mm extension. Even with the 70-200 f/2.8, I could not seem to achieve focus. Other than that, I found the tubes to be a whole lot of fun - bringing a new dimension to how I see things.




24
Feb

World's Greatest Shave!

So, by now most people will know ( quite likely due to my constant and unrelenting badgering for money and attempts to raise money through every possible source I can bring to bear ) that I’ve made the big decision of cutting off my hair. I made the decision roughly 3 or 4 months ago and mulled it around in my mind for a bit before finally deciding to do something about it early January. Those who attended that night would possibly recall my statement of putting an official price on my hair to be chopped of - that figure, 1500$ - formed the basis of how much I aim to raise for the Worlds Greatest Shave. I figure that someone who is going to chop off 3+ feet of hair ought to do it with style, and raising money for the Leukaemia Foundation is one hell of a good way to do it.

It’s kind of scary - not due to the fact my hair is going; its been a pain to keep maintained for quite some time - its more due to the fact that other than my mother who can’t remember me with short hair anyway, I can only seem to find two people I still know that would have even around when I had short hair and out of those two, only one can actually remember.

I think the most often asked question is “How long has it been long?”. I’ve had it cut once since growing it long - and that was 9+ inches cut off around 2 years ago. Other than that - my hair has been growing since I was around 18 or so. That’s a good 9 or 10 years, folks. For an idea of how long the hair is - check out here. Yes, its really that long.

As it stands, I’ve currently raised a touch over 1000$. Given that I only really started making a noise about it last Wednesday afternoon, I consider that an impressive tally so far. 3 days, 1000$. If i keep this up i could raise maybe 2000$ or even 2500$ if I’m really lucky!

On another matter - I’ve started getting more active with my strobist photography, with the help of Neil. I’ve got a flickr account and everything, which you can visit here, and I encourage all constructive criticisms and suggestions that can help me hone my techniques down. I’m really enjoying learning more details aspects of what I already do, and I think I’m catching on quickly.

I’m of course still awaiting my gear to come from MPEX - I’ve ordered two Strobist Wireless kits plus a few more goodies ( cactus wireless transmitters and a couple of white shoot through umbrellas ). Until that all arrives, I’m somewhat restricted to borrowing Neil’s gear, but given its almost a tutorial by him anyhow it’s somewhat fitting.

So, here ends an update. One of .. not many. I’ll try and update it a little more often to parade pictures around, but I’ll see how lazy I get.

End note: If you’re wishing to donate, please feel free to visit my profile page on the WGS website: here.

10
Dec

Daily Rituals

Every morning, there’s a certain ritual that I go through to break the new day in. I sit down - check my email for any major catastrophe thats happened overnight, delete spam, check my voicemail. I’m sure that this is all very familiar to just about everyone. Recently however, I’ve begun to make

My Morning Coffee!

these for myself. This is probably the step of the day that actually is a ritual - of course, I’m not entirely sure that I could function skipping this! The morning coffee is the bit that I actually end up waking up to.

Now, I’ve never been trained as a barista, nor has any of the guys here. But for the most part, I think we all do a fair job at making coffees for ourselves. But where exactly would you go to learn these skills, short of working for a coffee shop. It’s a skill i’d like to be better at - but for the life of me I couldn’t think of where you could do it. Surely, the Internets has some answers, yes?

05
Oct

Belated Lunar Eclipse!

Okay, so most of you know by now that there was a Lunar Eclipse. Mainly due to laziness, I haven’t bothered to update till now, and even then it’ll be a short and sweet one.

Okay, so I just found the images i took with Neil, which I had forgotten about. I’m bad I know. Long story short, spent a few hours waiting for the moon to come out from behind the clouds so i could take a photo with my tripod-mounted camera. My lenses weren’t able to zoom in enough to get the moon at a decent detail, but a quick borrowing of Neil’s 400mm zoom snarfed me the photo attached.

Lunar Eclipse - 29th Aug 2007

Enjoy. And maybe I’ll update again later.

10
Jun

My misadventure with Vista

So -

I tried to install Vista. For the most part, i actually suceeeded.
Continue reading ‘My misadventure with Vista’

26
Apr

Oh, Hi! I seem to have bought a car.

Vroom. Pics are under cut to save bandwidth.

Continue reading ‘Oh, Hi! I seem to have bought a car.’

11
Apr

Finished reading Snow Crash

Well after a few months of gnawing away at Snow Crash in my spare few minutes between waiting for people/travelling into the city and whatnot, i’ve finished reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I’m very very glad that I was given it for christmas ( Danny I think it was, pretty sure after he was surprised I hadn’t read it already.. ) as I thoroughly enjoyed it. The mixture of sci-fi/cyberpunk and the vague myths regarding religion was interestingly woven together. The hacker references being intermingled with various aspects of historical religious events seemed to merge well, the author drew logical conclusions between the two for the story which made a brain like mine used to various technological speak understand immediately.

Either way - extremely pleased with finishing the book, as always looking for more. Been recommended the Cryptomonicon which I might have a dig around for at some point in time soon, most likely when I can get to the nearest borders on the way to somewhere.

If anyone has any other recommendations along the cyberpunk/sci-fi kind of genre I’m open to suggestion.

Other news:

  • Writing some TCL for an eggdrop script that monitors the Eve-Online servers, and the Eve-Central market dumps.
  • Speaking of things ending in *CL, i’m learning more PCL5 and HP-GL/2.
  • Looking for more cars, the process is progressing.
  • New shoes. Damn they have this leather that hasnt worn in yet and is rubbing against my ankles :( hurty.
08
Apr

What’s New!

Well. I’ve had a quite busy last few months, and given the fact that I have a few days up my sleeve, I have decided to do an update. Because - well, i’m lazy, I’m gonna do this in point form.

What’s New:

  • New Job!
  • Graduation - Not yet, but I’ve been told I’ve passed.
  • More pants.
  • Dylan Moran at the Comedy Festival
  • Coming Soon: New Car!
  • Zomg, Chris is getting married.

What’s Not:

  • Broken Car.
  • Same Wednesday/Thursday night shenanigans.
    • I rock at the trick-shots.