WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

I’ve spent the last couple of days (Mon & Tues) in the Brisbane office being bored out of my mind. *Yawn* Nothing interesting to report.

I finally got around to getting some stuff done around the house.

I built a shelf for Bec. I bought some pine wood and brackets from Bunnings Warehouse and installed it on the wall in the laundry. Now all her washing liquid and fabric softeners and junk are up high out of the reach of the kids and off the chest freezer. That’ll make it much easier to get the freezer lid open but also makes the place look a lot tidier.  I also bought the parts to make a shelf above the computers in the lounge room at some stage.

I bought a couple of new doorknobs. One for Blake’s room and one for Sienna’s. They were about $17 but today I saw similar ones for $7 at Crazy Clark’s.. D’oh! Blake needs to be able to lock his door to prevent Sienna getting in there when he needs his privacy. Sienna’s door has a keyed lock on it which I want to replace with another doorknob which can be unlocked with a knife/screwdriver in case she somehow locks herself in there. I don’t think we have a key. I originally bought two doorknobs the same, with push-button locks on the inside but found out you cannot push the button in and shut the door to lock it when you go out as the button pops back out again when the door shuts. So I swapped it for another one with a turnable lock and will put the pushbutton one on Sienna’s door this weekend.

I also bought a sliding door lock and put it on the kitchen sliding door. Sienna is getting too damned clever and can open any locks we try to put on it which she can reach. Bec also tried tying a bit of material belt from the door handle and tied it around the fan switch which sticks out from the wall, but Sienna figured how to take that off. She also put a wooden stake (mmmmm steak) in the door track to stop Sienna opening it, but she still figured out how to pull that out of the way. Argh! So, now there’s a bolt which goes up into the track at the top of the door and she certainly won’t be able to reach that one! She has, in the past, figured out how to get a key for the front screen door and put it in the keyhole, turn the key and pull down on the handle all while standing on top of her toy car or table for height.  Yesterday she climbed up onto the kitchen bench in order to tip rice and gravox all over the table and floor. We’ve already gone through a whole jar of coffee and sugar which was spread around the lounge room and the lounge suite. There’s so many things we have to keep putting higher and higher out of her reach!

I also grabbed a plastic shelf to stick on the tiles in the bathroom so Bec can put her shampoo, conditioner and soap, etc on it to get them out of the way. I really hate those little tidy-shelves which hang around the shower pipe. They inevitably tip over and drop all their contents on the floor (or your foot first) and only fit two bottles in them and nothing else. This shelf is much better.

Today I went to the local shopping centre for lunch. I got some fish and chips then had a look around some of the shops. Did you know there’s a CSI:Miami board game out now? Why would anyone want to buy that? tsk

I also found a neat little mp3 player. It’s 24mm x 24mm x 24mm and apparently works quite well. It’s called the MobiBlu 1500.

AUDIO PLAYBACK FUNCTIONS
. Format Supported: MP3, WMA
. Decoding Range: MP3: 8Kbps – 320Kbps, WMA: 32Kbps – 192Kbps
. FM Radio: Yes, Internal
. Enhanced Sound: 5 Presets EQ, 1 User EQ

AUDIO RECORDING FUNCTIONS
. Voice Recording: N/A
. Direct Encoding: N/A
. FM Radio Recording: Yes, Low 48Kbps, Medium 96Kbps, High 128Kbps

DISPLAY FUNCTIONS
. Display: Single-colour OLED, Multi-line display
. Display Info: ID3 TAG (Track info. Song Title and Artist)
. Display Adjustment: Contrast, Backlight timer, Scroll speed
. Other Features: Clock/Watch, Battery level, Timer, Play modes
. Language Supported: English, Korean

Last night I went out with some friends from work. One of the guys knows someone whom could get us pre-screening tickets for "Serenity" - the new Joss Whedon movie.

There were no credits yet but best of all there were no advertisements. The tickets were only $10.00 so that was even better still! The movie started at 8:30pm and finished around 10:30pm. We got there about 8pm and lined up. Some guys had already reserved us spaces near the front of the line so we jumped ahead. After waiting about 10 minutes and chatting we grabbed some popcorn and coke and waited back in line. I had brought a jumper but took it off as there was no airconditioning on in the building (not even in the cinema), but it wasn’t overly hot.. just warm.

We got inside and had a bit of a chat from one of the local movie magazine journalists and then the movie started.

It has the usual Joss Whedon classic comedy moments which made everyone roar with laughter but also had it’s serious side. I kept changing my score of the show depending on what happened but I ended up with / 5 which is quite good. The storyline was great even though I’ve never watched the Firefly series. I think I have some catching up to do.  There were some unexpected moments and a few times I didn’t think it was going to be as good as I wanted, but it always redeemed itself. I think it could have even been stretched out some more but since I haven’t watched the series, this could be irrelevent.

Strangely enough, for once I only ate 2/3rds my popcorn. It was a Mega pack, but still I usually stuff it all in somehow.

Sienna slept from about 7:30pm until 12:30am by herself in her own room, then came into our room for the rest of the night. I didn’t get much sleep before then, so I slept until 9:30am.  The new Bunnings store opened just up the road from us. It’s a full sized warehouse, so Blake and I are on our way there in a few minutes to go check it out. It only opened about 8am this morning. We need lots of curtain rods and some locks for the glass sliding doors as Sienna is able to open them. In fact, she can open the hook lock we put on Blake’s door. She drags a kitchen chair over to his door and stands on it, then lifts the hook out of the eyelet and goes into his room and climbs up the high ladder onto his bed. She really is too damn clever for her own good.  She’s also dragging our old TV stand from one side of the room to the other and stands on it to get to the DVDs piled on the TV set. Argh!

The optimistic go-getters are struck with the reality of an economically rationalised employment market in which sparkly young people with big ideas and truckloads of self-confidence are nowhere near as valuable as their parents and teachers led them to believe.

Unpaid overtime, non-existent incentive payments, hostility towards employees who take sick or annual leave, unsafe work practices, extended trial periods and lack of training are among the complaints I hear from gen Yers having their first workplace experiences. Such complaints will increase under the industrial relations reforms, and each person will be expected to have the know-how, confidence and experience to negotiate his or her conditions.

Well said. Our company is always boasting "We have unlimited sick leave days. No limits at all!". But watch them whinge at me if I take a few days off over Winter when I have the flu and am so sick and tired and feel like shit. "What’s the matter? Don’t you like your job? Don’t you like the manager? What’s wrong? Why do you take so many days off? We have a gauge which tells us whom has the most days off under any circumstances and you are high on that list".  Err… I HAVE THE FLU!!!   ffs.

THE word "fail" should be banned from use in British classrooms and replaced with the phrase "deferred success" to avoid demoralising pupils, a group of teachers has proposed.

This is ridiculous!!! I remember when my sister was being trained as a teacher at the Uni and they said "Don’t put crosses on kids incorrect answers cos it will scar them for life"

What utter BULLSHIT! This is the dumbest thing ever. Are they suggesting that perhaps Kerry Packer was never marked ‘fail’ or with crosses and that’s why he’s such a success? No, I don’t think so. I think he and everyone else gets on quite fine. More evidence that the world has gone crazy! (Nb. I just pulled KP’s name out of thin air as a random example of someone whom is deemed a success).

Why oh why do they continue doing crap like this? Of course it’s not going to demoralise pupils. Has it done so ever in the last thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of years we’ve been learning? I don’t think so!

I can see us headed for schools which are even MORE like baby sitting places than they are now, until the kids are old enough to get jobs. Let’s dumb it down some more shall we? Don’t mark them at all cos if they get ticks for some things or an A-D they will know someone is better than them and therefore not try at all. Just send the kids to school to play all day then pick them up after school. Why bother teaching them something if you can’t tell them where they get it wrong? Don’t say it won’t happen because if the above quote is anything to go by, it’s already happening.

FFS! END RANT +++***AS%!@NO CARRIER

My funky Mailwasher software decided it didn’t like to run on my newly installed PC. It used to run fantastic, but now it doesn’t check email on startup until I doubleclick on it and after a couple of checks, it dies. I can’t download a new version because Mailwasher has gone all Commercial and I have no bucks so I started looking around to see what else is available.

I found a nice application called AvirMail. It might require Visual Basic libraries, but it’s nice and it seems to do all I wanted, plus more. It supports up to nine different mail accounts (iirc) and has AntiSpam abilities — filtering built in. I’ve set it up for a couple of my email POP accounts and tested it and it works well. It sits in the system tray and has a little icon which changes colour to let you know it’s checking email and when you have new email the icon changes and it makes a sound. It has more features, but that’s all I require. Let’s see how it goes for the next week or so. It also automatically adds itself to autostart when Windows boots up, which is great. Give it a go if you need a POP email checker and antispam filtering app… AND IT’S FREEWARE!

I’ve added more clothing for Second Life to my ZigZag.Soft website. Go have a look!

I haven’t had a huge amount of time to play Second Life during the last week or so. Over a week ago, my account accidentally was locked and it took a few days to get my license faxed to them to prove who I was to get it unlocked. Then we had Lisa stay and then Chris and Jo, so I’ve been off it. Sometimes I can’t get on as Sienna isn’t keen on sleeping so I keep her company instead of playing on my PC.

I finally decided to try my hand at designing clothing for Second Life so I designed a nice black shirt with the fiery crow logo from The Crow. I also created a skimpy bikini outfit. It’s not all that great looking, but I have to start somewhere, right?

Let me know what you think of the designs so far.

You can check out my clothing designs on the ZigZag.Soft site. I know it’s not really software as such, but the site was originally created for software stuff. Creating objects like the Flintstones car and adding scripts to it is sort of Software(ish) and the site is registered for a while longer, so I may as well use it and just call it "ZigZag Designs".

I did come up with an idea for a fun addition to Second Life but it’d take a heck of a lot of creating as well as designing a website to go with it, for the best effect. Unfortunately, I don’t have time for website design and unless I can make some changes to a CMS which is already programmed, I’m not going to do it. I have far too many other projects going on to manage yet another website.

We decided to have a quiet day at home today since we’ve had visitors and stuff happening.

The kids were not up to going to swimming lessons today. Blake is still sniffling and Sienna has been a bit unwell also. Bec was up all night too although we think that may have been some dodgy pasta we cooked last night. I think it was in the fridge for too long.

Blake had a few races the other day at school. He came last in one and first in the other one. CONGRATULATIONS BLAKE! WELL DONE! It’s okay to come last sometimes, tho so we’re glad you didn’t get angry or sad when you came last (we’ve been told to push that angle). He told us the teachers sent him to Sick Bay for a rest and he had a sleep there. That night he looked so tired we told him he didn’t have to eat his dinner if he wasn’t up to it, so he went to bed to have a sleep instead. Poor kid.

A couple of guys at work had a day off work and some went home yesterday afternoon. Our air conditioning has been out for over a week and it’s starting to get to everyone. The management put on a Spit Roast to make it up to us and brought in a couple of Slushie machines. I had a mango slushie and some spit roast with coleslaw. Well, the lady asked me what salads I wanted and I said coleslaw, coleslaw and coleslaw thanks. hehe.

The kids have been out the back running around most of the morning. They’ve come inside to watch a new Simpsons DVD I bought them at Coles last week. How about that? A whole generation which have never been without the Simpsons. Makes ya think.  Then again.. maybe not, knowing the people whom would be reading this blog

I’ve given up on programming for pocket devices like Palms and PocketPCs. I’ve been doing more designs for Second Life. More on that later.

Lisa, Stephen and Gina are really looking forward to moving into their new home. It’ll be great for them as they will have a shitload more space as they are pretty much cramped in the old unit I used to live in many years ago. There was only one to two people living in it at that stage.. me and a gf, but with three people living in the one little unit which has only one bedroom and a very small lounge room, I’d be going nuts! I just hope it’s going to be warm enough in there for them in winter, but luckily we’re moving out of the cold season now.