WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

Here’s a bit of an insight:  http://www.danasview.net/where.htm

Everyone still has the flu. It’s really running everyone down. Unfortunately, my manager thinks I’m faking it so is being a pain. I guess he doesn’t know there’s thousands of people around Australia.. and inded the world.. whom are very sick. I was talking to a friend from England last night and she said she’s just getting over some terrible flu too. The guy at work whom brings lunches around to sell said his whole family has pneumonia. He’s the only one that’s escaped it so far. His wife and two kids are stuck at home in bed. He was sick for one day and stayed in bed but he’s still getting around selling food even though he has a lingering cough.  I’ve been taking some antibiotics and Bisolvin medicine which seems to be helping a bit. Still runs me down though. I was going to take the kids swimming today but my alarm didn’t go off and I woke up at 10:30am which is when the swimming starts.

Blake will soon be winging his way back to Sydney for a couple of weeks.  I hope he has a real nice time down there. He usually loves it and tells us all about his fun travels.. where he went and what he did.

My parents are not superstitious people. In fact, they are very ‘churchy’, but there’s one thing they DO believe in. Whenever you see an owl around your home it means someone is going to die. The only times they have ever seen an owl in the backyard was when people were about to die. It first happened when my grandmother died and again about a year or so later when my grandfather decided he had nothing more to live for and let himself go. Last week, they saw an owl on the clothesline in the backyard and knew something was about to go horribly wrong. A few days later, my mum’s friend committed suicide. Mum said she hadn’t heard exactly how the deed was done, yet, but she was really upset about it.

We’re going to take it easy this weekend. I was going to wash the cars myself to save money but I think we may need to go to a carwash instead as I’m so exhausted and sick with the flu that I just don’t have the energy to do it.

If you haven’t yet seen Tripping the Rift then you surely do NOT know what you are missing!!

I’m sure I saw a preview of this a long time ago and it was funny as hell! Now looking at it with the sexy Six of One (rawr!) I can’t stop myself watching it!

Apparently there were several internet ’shorts’ created - a bunch of mini shows and it became a tv series.

Tripping the Rift features the classic Stephen Root as captain Chode. Loved him in Office Space and News Radio (as well as Nemo of course). Maurice LaMarche whom has done so many voices on so many shows plays Gus. Gina Gershon & Carmen Electra play Six of One (and half a dozen of the other?).. God she’s so sexy with bouncy boobzes!! And other characters are great as well. Sorry. Can’t get my mind off Six  Hubba Hubba!

Saturday morning, I took the kids swimming as usual. I almost didn’t as I’ve still been feeling sick but went anyway and got there halfway thru the lessons. Sienna’s teacher let us stay for the next class which only had a couple of kids in it anyway so that was good. We finished up and came home to a warm shower to clean off the chlorine and the kids played outside while I watched some TV to relax. Later in the day, I drove the kids up to their grandparents’ place and we jumped into their spa and had a nice relaxing time. Gotta love those spray jets!!

I bought some chicken from Coles on the way up and we had that for lunch. We left in the evening and headed back home. Bec has not been well either so it was good for her to have a break from the noisy kids anyway.

This morning I got up and made some breakfast then headed to Bi Lo to get some groceries with the kids. Bec was still feeling under the weather so she stayed home. We had a great time shopping (well as good as can be shopping) and I got lots of fresh fruit and some frozen veges along with other stuff more healthy than I usually buy. I guess that book I read of Bec’s mum’s really started sticking in my head.

The kids ran around outside this afternoon and I just rested. I got some lozenges today which numb the throat so that’s helping my sore throat. I’ve actually been sick almost all the time since March. I’m so over being sick but every time I’m feeling better, Bec or the kids get it and shortly afterwards I’m sick again. I’d like to take a while off work but my manager is already whinging at me and thinks I take far too much time off, so I’m stuck going to work while sick. Yay

Unfortunately I have had quite a bit of time off due to being genuinely sick every time. The doctors haven’t been able to cure it. Just make it go away for a few days then WHAM! it’s back again. I’ve spent so much money on tablets and medicines, etc this year I’m sure the pharmaceutical companies are loving me. So now my manager requires me to bring a doctor’s certificate even if I only have one day off.

Sorry bout the missing websites. Shit happens and stuff. Full /tmp dir and a rogue process (or is that rouge? I like sexy red ones).

Tell me you dont want a HydroFoam and I’ll call you a fucken liar.

Work is pissing me off at the moment. Can’t say much but don’t think I’ll be there much longer. Not entirely my choice.

Sienna is getting over her flu. I’ve been keeping her company in her room at night with my little heater going all night keeping the temperature at a constant 24 degrees. The warm air is definitely helping both of us and Bec is getting a bit more sleep with Sienna out of the room. Sienna is usually waking about 6:50am which is good. There’s not a lot of room on her single bed however.  I’ve been using nasal spray to keep my sinuses open during the night and so I’m breathing a lot better, which is good as my sleep apnoea ensures I don’t get enough oxygen while sleeping and usually wake up feeling like I’ve had 2 hours sleep. The nasal spray is helping me feel more refreshed the next day due to actually breathing during the night.

Blake has had the last couple of days off school due to the flu as well. It’s going thru the whole family. He was rather well behaved today though which is good, so I bought everyone some Peters Drumstick minis which are miniature Drumstick icecreams — just the right size for kids.

Second Life is still going well. Still having great fun there.

Work is pissing me off at the moment. Can’t say much but don’t think I’ll be there much longer. Not entirely my choice.

Sienna is getting over her flu. I’ve been keeping her company in her room at night with my little heater going all night keeping the temperature at a constant 24 degrees. The warm air is definitely helping both of us and Bec is getting a bit more sleep with Sienna out of the room. Sienna is usually waking about 6:50am which is good. There’s not a lot of room on her single bed however.  I’ve been using nasal spray to keep my sinuses open during the night and so I’m breathing a lot better, which is good as my sleep apnoea ensures I don’t get enough oxygen while sleeping and usually wake up feeling like I’ve had 2 hours sleep. The nasal spray is helping me feel more refreshed the next day due to actually breathing during the night.

Blake has had the last couple of days off school due to the flu as well. It’s going thru the whole family. He was rather well behaved today though which is good, so I bought everyone some Peters Drumstick minis which are miniature Drumstick icecreams — just the right size for kids.

Second Life is still going well. Still having great fun there.

So it looks like my Netvista 6645 server is going well with Mandrake 10.1 on it. Pity none of the other Operating systems like it. Bec had trouble getting to the shared drive today and yet yesterday I changed it to 750 so maybe there’s a security script running that changes home directories back to 700. It’s not in cron so I will have to look around.

I have a friend whom loves FreeBSD. He tells me that FreeBSD should not be expected to support ‘crappy proprietary computers without keyboard controllers’. Hmm. Methinks he and FreeBSD are going to find it a problem in the future. The keyboard controller is really going the way of the dinosaur since there is no need for it any more, what with USB keyboards these days. The A20 gate for the controllers is left over from the days of 8086 to 80286 updating so why keep something which is an obvious legacy hanging around? The 6645 didn’t. It also threw out the Floppy drive. Both good ideas, if you ask me. The problem is FreeBSD keeps looking for a keyboard controller and refuses to boot the OS if there isn’t one.. or, to be precise, it keeps waiting for a code from the controller to say "I’m ready to go ! Let’s do this!". Since there is no controller, it ain’t going to get that code, yet it continues waiting. Obviously Mandrake 10.1 (yay) doesn’t care about this and lets you run the OS without it. Good call!

Further experiments and a more detailed examination of the FreeBSD PXEboot source code, show that the subroutine responsible for enabling A20 gate is “guilty”. It contains 2 possibly infinite loops, and indeed the Netvista falls into the first of them. The reason is that A20 gate is normally enabled by software, through the keyboard controller. But this machine has no standard keyboard controller, and it falls in a loop of indefinite waiting for the non-existing controller to become ready. The same A20 subroutine is present in the CD-ROM bootstrap code and also in the hard disk bootstraps.

Another friend reckons Gentoo can cope with this situation as well, but since I’m too lazy and don’t want to stuff around, Mandrake is better for me

I’ve still got the flu.. yuk.. and Sienna has picked it up too. She was rolling around, coughing and kicking me all night last night. Poor kid. I think she was finding it hard to breathe and kept waking herself up. Bec isn’t 100% today either.

So what’s been happening lately?

Blake has gone to his grandparents’ place for the weekend. He was so excited. Unfortunately, he is sick at the moment and has been going to bed early the last few nights.

I’ve got the flu the last couple of days. It seems just as I get over it, it’s back again. It could be from the other day when we got our tax done. There was a guy paying his tax bill and his kid was coughing up his lungs right next to me. Yay

Wednesday was Bec’s birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY!! Sorry it’s late but I’ve been busy as you know hehe. I took the day off work and we went to the shopping centre and got our tax done WOOHOO! We had some breakfast there and came back home afterwards as Sienna was tired and cranky. My appointment was at 10:00am but the guy before me didn’t bring most of his info and his wife didn’t bring any papers at all so I had to sit around for an hour before we started. Glad to get it out of the way tho.  Got Bec a bedside lamp for her birthday. She was happy cos she really wanted one so she could read a book in bed.

I picked up a couple of old PCs for Blake and I. I set up Blake’s one. The PCs are "legacy free" and so don’t have any PS2 ports at all and no floppy drive. I had to buy Blake a $15 USB mouse and a $20 USB keyboard as we only has PS2 devices at home.

Windows XP installed great on Blake’s one, but FreeBSD doesn’t like PCs without keyboard controllers. This machine has no need for a controller as it has no PS2 slots, so FreeBSD kept locking up on bootup. I tested SuSE and RedHat Enterprise at work but SuSE locked up scanning for a controller. RHE3 worked but kept complaining about the missing controller and at any rate it’s commercial so I can’t keep it. Was just testing I tried Fedora at home since RHE3 sorta worked but it kept doing a KERNEL PANIC. Knoppix didn’t like it much either, so in the end in desperation I tried Mandrake 10.1 (now renamed Mandriva). SUCCESS! It worked wonderfully. No complaining. No errors. Nothing. Just a perfect install. WOOHOO! Ten points to Mandrake yet again.

I mounted my FreeBSD drive and copied all the files to the new Reiser3 Mandrake partition. I’m going to reformat the FreeBSD drive as Reiser3 as well. The new server is doing great. I’ve gone from a hernia-inducing full tower with Celeron 433 to a tiny desktop Netvista 6645 with PIII 800MHz CPU ….. and loving it!

I had a tiny bit of trouble getting samba to work until I remembered I had installed Shorewall firewall and it was blocking SMB connections. Soon as I learned how to set that up properly, Samba was working fine and I connected from my desktop.

At some stage I will have to upgrade to the latest community version of Mandriva. In the meantime I might just update my urpmi packages like ProFTP and OpenSSH and Samba to make sure there’s not too many vulernabilities. Might re-subscribe to the Mandriva mailing list on my GMail account soon too.. just to keep up to date with news and info. Don’t use my GMail for anything else. heh. Everyone has one or doesn’t want one. I have 50 invites same as everyone else and you can’t give them away any more. You probably could not even pay someone to take one

So, I had yesterday off with the flu. Today I still have it so no swimming for the kids. With Blake sick and Sienna coughing it’s probably a good idea anyway.

Oh yeh. The new server didn’t have room for a second HDD. I took out the old IBM 20Gigger and put in my 120Gb Western Digital drive for my main one and installed Mandrake with the cdrom which came with the PC. I went out and bought a removable drive bay and stuck my 200Gb Western Digital in there and jammed the drive bay into the PC. Unfortunately, the drive bay didn’t fit in nicely since the RAM chips are right behind the 5.25" drive bay, so I lifted the back end of the drive bay and sat it on top of the RAM chips hehe. Not a great idea but it worked. Then I just had to shove the case on the PC as best as I could and screw it in.

I’ve still been having fun in Second Life. I’ve started work on a new multiplayer game. All the graphics and card design is completed and some scripting. Next is the game logic then linking to a scoreboard, etc. Should be fun!

So what have I been up to in Second Life?

Now I’m hosting SLingo on a regular basis, I have a decent income. This has allowed me to get my own place. A friend of mine, Amber, spent Saturday buying and setting up furniture in a home she shares with a friend of hers. She put a double bed upstairs with a couple of leather chairs and a rug along with lamps and a picture. I hung around there for the evening chatting to her and resting on the lounge suite she installed downstairs. She had a photo on her PCs desktop of a creek in the forest she took a photo of some time ago and wanted it in-game so I got her to email it to me and I created a picture frame with the photo inside, which she hung on the wall.

This got me thinking and I decided to find my own place to live, so I spent several hours visiting areas to find low-rent accommodation and trying to chat to people to find somewhere to rent off them. I talked to one girl whom had places but then she got very busy and stopped talking so I posted a request on the forum and someone answered me in-game. I visited a few places he had and finally settled on a bungalow in the Tiki area owned by the Cub Water Club. It’s L$100 per week with up to 100 prims (3d objects) allowable. That’s enough to get me started. I was going to purchase some furniture but decided to make my own. I started off trying to create a lounge but could not get it right and in the end turned it into a single padded chair I called the "Industrial Chair" as it has what looks like metal pipes cut in half for the feet and backrest. You can check it out at the usual place: http://www.ZigZagSoft.com/

I also created a TV out of the demo textures you can get and a cube and placed that on a table I had which I edited to remove the red and white checkered tablecloth and changed the legs from wood to black metal and changed the tabletop from wood to glass. It looks quite nice. I also created a rug with a rug texture and a cube prim squashed and stretched out. I made a light out of a half-sphere prim and stuck it in the roof. It doesn’t seem to give off a lot of light tho. So, I’ve gone back to doing some more design stuff. I might keep making some furniture in the future and put it all together as a suite to sell via a vendor. Maybe a chair, lounge, lamp, rug, tables all together in one package and make them copyable so the buyers can make two chairs with a couple of lamps and a couple of tables as they require. I think a package of lounge objects is more likely to sell than single items. Especially if they all match nicely.

I started working on an idea for a new game for Second Life. I can’t talk too much about it as I don’t want my idea stolen But it should be a nice change from SLingo and TRingo for players. It’s not usually a multiplayer game, but I’ve changed some rules and added extra stuff to make it more fun and playable. I created some test cards to try out the game on paper first with Bec and she had a quick go last Friday night. It’s not really her cup of tea, but it showed the game could work at any rate. How much fun it will be will depend on the players I guess. Particularly if they are playing against each other to become the #1 winner and take out the ‘pot’ of money as donated by players. I will have to see how much SLingo and TRingo games sell for since the creator doesn’t make royalties from the game, only the initial sale.

While looking for places to stay, I came across a land that’s made cartoon-like. It even has chupachups for trees! It looked quite cute. Another place I went to had a Time Machine and I travelled back in time and saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex coming at me before being transported to Pompeii when Mt Vesuvius was erupting! Then it was back to the current time. It was a fun ride which I probably would never have known about had I not just gone looking around.

Since I had been flying all over the place to check out potential places to live, I found it very slow and cumbersome. Particulary when you wanted to cover vast distances. I popped onto the forum to see if anyone had created a jet backpack to fly me around faster. I checked out one going for L$200 but someone on the forum mentioned checking out Cubey Terra’s Aerodrome. I teleported over there and flew to the Aerodrome trying to find where the jetpacks were on sale but found nothing. Shortly afterwards a person parachuted down into the building and had an avatar in the shape of a fox. I asked him if he had seen any jetpacks around and he said "Hmm. Jetpacks. I think I have one in my inventory". So I asked him how much it’d be and he gave it to me for free!!!! I strapped it on and went flying. MAN! Does it go!! I kept crashing into mountains and things because I was going so fast heheh. Well. That’s all I was after, so I thanked him and headed back home to do some more work on my place.

I’ll have to upload some photos of my Bungalow some time in the future. Keep an eye on ZigZagSoft.com for more designs from me.

Yesterday I had an annual leave day off to take Bec to her next interview. It’s going along nicely but everso slowly. Hopefully this is the last one and we shall soon see some results.

We popped into a childcare centre to see if we can drop Sienna in there one day a week. It’d be fantastic for her to interact with other kids her age and also give Bec one day a week of rest without a screaming bubby around.  We finally weaned her using the ‘nipple-bandaids’ method but she still gets sooky and tries to have a suck even though there’s nothing there any more. Last night she was screaming at God knows what hour, so I grabbed her and took her into her own room and stayed the night with her in there so Bec could get some sleep. She went straight back to sleep with me.

After the childcare centre, we headed down south to a morning tea meeting about Aspergers regarding Blake. Bec had a good chat with the ladies and I stayed over an hour, but then took Sienna out to keep her occupied and grabbed some lunch.

Yesterday afternoon I watched a couple of DVDs. "National Treasure" with Nicolas Cage wasn’t too bad. A nice watch even if unbelievable. Could have been a bit better, but still watchable.

I also watched "Lost Junction" with Neve Campbell. I thought it’d be like that other one with twists.. Wild Things.. but it turned out not to be. It was watchable, but strange.

Friday night, I grabbed a couple of DVDs from the local Video Ezy shop after signing up for an account there. I was going to watch them Friday night, but Sienna was awake until late and wouldn’t settle unless she could watch one of her kiddy shows, so I watched them Saturday instead.

Saturday morning, I took the kids swimming again. They had a fantastic time as usual. Sienna was running around all morning saying "Swimming day! Swimming day!". After swimming I went to the barber and got a long overdue haircut. I should have had it done about three weeks before but I never get it cut until it’s really pissing me off. After that, we had some lunch and I watched Eulogy. It was okay. Nothing brilliant but a nice show to watch. When that ended I mowed the lawn and got the whipper snipper out onto it as well. Bec had been waiting for that for a couple of months but with rain and other family events it kept getting pushed back. By this stage, the cat could lie down in the grass and you could not see him hehe  It was just one area like this. Most of the rest of the lawn was still short, but it all had to be mown anyway.

I finished the mowing and had a shower to get rid of my loose hair and grass clippings then sat down with an 800ml bottle of VB and watched The Anchorman. I have to say I’m not a huge Will Ferrell fan. It was watchable. Barely. Take a peek if you have nothing else to watch, but it’s nothing you will really miss. Maybe if they showed some more of Christina Applegate’s skin it would have been worth it  Same for Zooey Deschanel in Eulogy.

Eulogy:

Anchorman:

Saturday arvo not a lot happened. I mucked around on Second Life and the kids ran around the house.

Sunday morning, we headed to the markets. I was intending to buy a cheap digital watch but couldn’t make up my mind. We also wanted to get a bed lamp, but didn’t find any there to buy. I grabbed a crappy $1 coffee and we headed back home.

Around lunch time, Bec’s parents turned up and we had some snags and kebabs on the BBQ and Bec threw some salad together with some coleslaw for our lunch. Sienna thinks the fire in the BBQ is "COOL, Daddy!" so I might have to watch that one heh.  We’ve taught her to imitate the girl on the lollies advertisement on TV and say "Chop it, daddy!". Very cute. (In the ad, the father is cutting each lolly in half and giving one to his daughter and having the other half himself. He pulls out a dinosaur lolly and she tells him ‘Don’t chop the dinosaur, daddy!!!’ so he puts the whole thing in his mouth and she has this astounded look on her face. The next time they come across a dinosaur, she says "Chop it!").

We had a nice lunch catching up and the kids were very excited to see their grandparents. After they left, we all had a rest. Sienna by this time was way beyond tired. She had cried in the car on the way back from the markets as she was that tired, but got a second wind when nana and nunu arrived. I gave her my mobile phone with the Wiggles music on it and she was happier in the car singing along with "Toot toot!".

In Second Life, Amber (a friend of mine) and I were looking around for somewhere less laggy to play SL-ingo (Second Life bingo - very addictive and fun) when we found a practically deserted place.  There were only a couple of people there and so we joined in. I had a chat to the owner and soon he asked me if I wanted to host SL-ingo games myself. Well, I didn’t have a job in Second Life to add to my income and we just love playing SL-ingo, so I accepted the job. I now host a SL-ingo game twice a week at night Australian time. I don’t think there were any hosts for early morning games so this was a perfect opportunity. There are a couple of other SL-ingo games on at the same time (where we used to hang out) but they are very laggy areas and it’s annoying trying to play. They are also very noisy with lots of other games around talking and beeping, etc. "SOUTH I" where I host is very peaceful and there’s no noise anywhere nearby nor any other game machines. My job is to start the games, accept donations for the jackpot, close the games, pay the winner and keep the conversation going so people have somewhere fun to come to. I also can start impromptu games for my friends at any time. I had an official game last night as my first hosting attempt and had a great time. At one stage we had about six other people playing and others drifted in and out of the game. It ended up being a great time for all. Now I have somewhere to make money from while playing a fun game I always liked to play at any rate.

After my hosting ended at 9pm AEST, we headed over for a game of TRingo. It’s a cross between Bingo and Tetris. It took a little getting used to, but I was doing okay. I didn’t win any games as many other people have had much more practice at it, but I still had a nice time there.