WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

Why is it that after four years having a bike but not the opportunity to ride it, I finally get the chance and motivation to ride daily and my chain breaks?? Aargh!

I bought my pc upgrades yesterday. I saved about $200 by buying cheaper stuff. Funnily enough, it was $219 to buy just an Amd XP 3000+ cpu or $204 to buy a new motherboard and Amd 64bit cpu!!
I figured it was about time to go 64bit. It also meant I could get a PCI Express graphics card which is great since they are ceasing production on AGP cards. I got my nVidia 6600GT! It’s a cheaper brand but it works and is a shitload better than my old Ti4200 which is only AGP 4x.
I only got a 128mb card and it cost $225. Same price as the AGP one next to it

The motherboard is a Foxconn one and the power socket on it is a 24 pin socket. The plug on my power supply is 20 pin, but it turns out you can still plug it in. Cheering! I wiped off C: drive after backing up my profile and reinstalled. I have got it going nicely now and damn it’s fast!! Interestingly, when you first install XP it’s slow as hell before you put the motherboard drivers on. You could see it redrawing windows.
I downloaded the latest beta nVidia drivers but it could not see the card at all.. scary! I had to install them from the supplied cd. Even when that worked it still could not see the card. Even Windows didn’t know what brand/model it was although I did briefly boot the Pc before formatting and it autodetected the card, so some hope there.

I haven’t had time to try any games yet tho. Was busy installing anti-spyware and anti-virus software and some other important applications first.

Rain.. I was supposed to be mowing the lawn this weekend but it rained both days so I will try again next week.

Thanks for the link to Digg (I think it was BatGrrl?). I’ve even passed it on to friends and now they use that as their main feed instead of Slashdot, etc. However, it seems the site is becoming TOO popular and today has had to close down their main site while they look for more servers to add. Heh. Being too good can be a bad thing

I’ve been busy spending so much of my time writing articles on Wikipedia. The damn site can be addictive for people like me I’ve fixed up some missing links and added other articles.

Last night I updated an article stub with more information regarding Endodontics in dentistry. I even drew an image to demonstrate tooth decay! If only I can figure out how to stop my sessions from timing out and logging me out. It seems to be happening to a number of people, so hopefully they will fix it soon.

Today is the day for Sienna’s swimming lessons (Swimming day.. or "Swimming dee-ay" as she puts it). After that I might head to the local tavern to meet up with a friend and play pool. Tomorrow I will pop up to the Sunday Computer Markets (linked from my Del.icio.us feed on the right there) and see if i can get my new PC at a reduced price.

Over the last few days I’ve been adding to and updating articles on the Wikipedia site. I decided to create an account there and have made a User page, which is like an ‘About me’ information page.
It’s certainly fun to see your own work on a public encyclopaedic page which can be enjoyed by many people and updated as needed.
One problem is it can be addictive as you look for more ways to help out an add more content. I spent most of today writing Wikipedia articles.

Today is our 4th Wedding Anniversary.
I went to the local shopping centre near work today and popped into EB
Games (Electronics Boutique Games). They had Quake 4 for $89.95 and a
big sticker saying “We will match any price”. I got them to ring up
GameDude (www.gamedude.com.au) and confirm a lower price and got $5 off
the game
I gave it to Bec this afternoon and she’s already loving it! She’s right
into FPS Shootem ups.
I’m going to have to spend about $650 to upgrade my PC. Turns out you
can’t easily get Athlon 32bit chips any more and so I’m going to go
AMD64 which will bring me a lot up to date anyway. I’m going to get an
nVidia 6600 video card too.. possibly GT depending on the price I can
get it for. I might go to the Sunday Computer Markets this weekend and
grab a case, motherboard, cpu, graphics card and some RAM.
I think I’ll get an Asus motherboard ( ASUS A8N5X NVIDIA nForce4 Chipset
PCI express Audio 8 Channel LAN USB 2.0 ).
Maybe an MSI video card ( 6600 256mb or 6600gt 128mb). Apparently it’s
better to get a GT than an extra 128Mb RAM.
And an AMD64 3000+ CPU to throw in the mix. I’ll need another half Gb of
RAM as well.
That should be enough for a few years to get me out of trouble.
I’m going to try some 3d gaming which I’ve not done much of for years.
I’ve been trying out Eve Online. I played it for a couple of hours the
other night and only got a short way through the tutorial!! It’s very
complex. It’s like Elite but in MMORPG format. Space Trading and stuff.
I might try Bec’s Quake 4 as well. I wonder if we can use the same CD to
play against each other.. probably not.

It’s about time I added a plugin to let me blog via email. What with
having a mobile phone which I can email from, it’s the next logical step.

You have seen me blog using the Flickr service. I set up a Flickr
account [utilising my current Yahoo ID] and tell it how to contact my
WordPress blog and set up an account on WP for it. Flickr gives me an
email address to email photos to, but also another email address which
allows me to email photos to Flickr which are automatically posted to my
blog at the same time.

Now, if I only want to post a blog entry without a photo, Flickr won’t
let me do that afaik, so I looked around and WP can already do this
itself. I just had to add in the ‘WP-Cron’ and ‘WP-Cron-mail’ plugins
and set up an account on my bangrocks.com email which I can email blog
entries to and WP will automatically add this to my blog in the Category
I choose [apparently] along with any inline images attached to the
email. NEAT!

It’s about time I added some nice functionality to this site and it’s
about time I found some good uses for my A1000 mobile phone. With these
cool blog stuff above using flickr and WP along with using AvantGo to
download news and info, my A1000 is starting to be useful again and I’m
starting to like it again.

I had some problems with my A1000 after flashing the Firmware, but found
out today I had missed a setting or it had disappeared, so I put it back
in and everything is hunky dory. I also found out I have the
Entertainment Value Pack which allows me to look up movies at the local
cinemas, find local bars and restaurants, watch comedy movies and other
fun stuff.

Let’s see if I can attach a picture to this email I’m sending from my
default email client on my PC and have it appear on my blog.

I’m also going to upgrade my PC. I gave Bec 512Mb from my PC and my AMD
2500+ CPU and I have her AMD 1600+ CPU until I upgrade. I also purchased
another 512Mb for myself the other day. I’m going to have to go AMD
Athlon/64 and a 64bit motherboard as it’s apparently hard to get 32bit
CPUs now. I will also get a new graphics card as the fan on mine is not
working and it’s a very old card anyway [nVidia Ti 4200]. Might get a
mobo with PCIe if I can afford it. Along with more RAM and a new case. I
want to turn this 1600+ AMD PC with 512Mb RAM into the server with 3
HDDs and the PCI TV card and also use it to watch TV and movies in the
lounge.

The view at my work

Originally uploaded by waulok.

This is a photo of the view out the back of the office where I work. It’s not very high resolution as I didn’t want to send a huge image. I hate main webpages ( or other pages ) with images which are too big that is why you mostly see small photos on my website.

By the way, this is a test post directly from my mobile phone. Maybe I can find some good use for it after all! At least it’d be handy when on holidays

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

The winner of the 2005 Melbourne Cup was Makybe Diva.

I had $5 for win or place on it.

MD paid 3.8 for a WIN and 2.0 for a PLACE. Since I had both I got 5.8 * $5 bet = $29.

I didn’t get anything at all for my Trifecta. I guess I need to have the first three horses somewhere in my list. I had 2 out of 4 so not enough to win anything.

Makybe Diva - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So, yeah. Lost $5 all up. Them’s the breaks

Telltale Games disclosed tonight what many adventure fans have been waiting to hear for over a year: Sam & Max is making a comeback.

The deal was inked only days ago, and few details are available as of now. Telltale stresses that the game will not be Sam & Max: Freelance Police, the LucasArts title whose highly-publicized 2004 cancellation was widely mourned by fans. New content will be developed, and the game will be implemented in an episodic format similar to that of Telltale’s Bone games. Purcell, who works at Pixar, says he will be as involved with the Sam & Max project as he can be.

"If there’s a better match, I don’t know who it is… I trust them," Purcell said, when asked why he chose to work with Telltale. Purcell knows the Telltale team from their LucasArts days and is comfortable with their handling of the upcoming first Bone game, which is adapted from the well-known comic by Jeff Smith. When LucasArts’ hold on the Sam & Max rights ran out this spring, Purcell and Telltale had the freedom to move forward.

Telltale has positioned itself as a company intent on delivering high-quality, story-driven games to an audience hungry for interactivity. "Around a year ago, we left the bosom of the game industry because we saw opportunity," Connors said of the team’s departure from LucasArts. According to Bruner, Telltale’s plan for licenses such as Bone and Sam & Max is "bigger than video games. It’s interactive entertainment."

Adventure Gamers will provide more details about the Sam & Max project as they become available. For now, disillusioned fans can stop signing petitions and set aside the bitterness over all those false rumors. We spoke; they listened.

From Adventure Gamers.

YAY! S&M is back!

I’ve got my tickets, so let’s hope one of my damn horses wins!

Win/Place: #1 #10

Trifecta: #1 #2 #6 #8

Sweeps: #12

If #3 or something wins, I’m gonna be really shitty!!

Wish me luck or I’ve paid about $34 for bits of paper and cardboard to throw in the bin.

Melbourne Cup - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia