WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

I haven’t played Second Life in so long, so I spent the last couple of days catching up with friends. I finally installed Skype and chatted to a couple of them. One from the UK and one from NZ.. talk about funny accents. Yet, they had the gall to say that *I* had the accent!

I spent about $L4,000 on new avatar stuff. I bought a new shape, new clothes, new skin and a new rental home to live in. Below, you can see my new stuff:

A day for celebration for the old diggers.

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening packing away stuff and throwing out lots of crud. I filled about half a dozen shopping bags with rubbish and threw it out. I filled about four big garbage bags with linen and about four boxes full of kitchen ware. The kitchen cupboards are all but empty and the same for the linen cupboard.

Yesterday I faxed in an application form for a place to live. Wish me luck in getting it. I have about four weeks to get out of the house, although they said if I need more time they are willing to offer it.

Eurgh! 5:50am is too early to wake up.

My damn ear is sore again. It’s been sore for about 3 months now. I’ve had antibiotics, ear drops and nurofen to stop it aching. It goes away but then comes back again after about a week. I’m sick of it. I think it’s mostly because I put in silicon ear plugs to block out the sound of traffic outside my house. I try not to wear them mostly but if I can’t sleep due to the DOOF DOOF of subwoofers and cars/bikes screaming past trying to do 100kph in a 60 zone. I hate being a superlight sleeper. Well, the house is sold so soon I will be living elsewhere and I can find a place off the main road.

I took Sienna up north yesterday. We got Bec to sign the papers to sell the house then went househunting. The first place I looked at is very nice. Only $275pw with ensuite, a/c in main bedroom & lounge, study, bathroom with bath & separate shower, small backyard with pergola & shed and a small front yard.. so not too much mowing for me YAY! I grabbed an application form. I think that one’s available around 27th May. I timed my driving and it’d take about 10-12 mins to get to Bec’s house. Another bonus is the local shopping centre has a swimming school on the bottom level for babies 3 months old and up. Sweet! Whoever heard of swimming at the shopping centre? I guess in the future when she is swimming by herself I can do shopping while she swims heh. Handy! They also had an area for kids to play but they wouldn’t accept her since kids have to be 3yo and up. She was a bit disappointed. I even bought a PC mag I didn’t want just to have something to read for an hour while she played. Oh well. We just jumped in the car and came home. The car next to where I parked must have a big family. They have a station wagon and the back seat was down and the whole back of the car was chockers with food!

Yep. The Real Estate agent has just left here after I signed all the forms. I have to take them to Bec to sign and drop them back at the agent’s office. There’s also a backup offer of the same amount minus $1k, so we have a safety net, but I don’t think it’ll be required.

We got the money we wanted and can pay off our mortgage, our credit cards, my personal loan and have a bit left over.

Hooray!

I’ve already lined up a couple of places to check out and I might look at them tomorrow since I have to go up that way anyhow to get Bec to sign stuff. They said I can take the cat, so that’s a bonus since I didn’t want to give up Symbian to the animal shelter again and I’m sure he didn’t want to go either.

Poor Sienna fell asleep in the car on the way back to my place tonight. She told me "I shouldn’t put my finger in my nose and eat my nose" hehe.. how cute!

Got an sms message on my mobile (that’s a "text message" for you new agers):

It’s a baby! Caitlyn Zoe Smith born at 11:55. 3.78kg. Jo and bub doing well.

Way to go! Just rang them now and had a chat to Chris. He’s at the airport picking up the in-laws.

He hasn’t updated his blog nor sent out photos and I told him off for that and not being on MSN to say hi. Tsk! What’s going on? I told him he’s just too lazy! And apparently Joey is just resting it all off! How lazy can you get? Again I say "tsk".

What a busy weekend.

Thursday night Lisa arrived after flying up from Sydney and we went out to the Casino. Lisa had some dinner, but I had already eaten cos I can’t wait until 10pm to eat. I didn’t play any games. I’d have liked to try BlackJack but at $10 minimum bet I wasn’t game to lose that much moolah. Other tables were $25 minimum. I just watched a lot of games while Lisa played the pokies. I had a quick look at Texas Hold’em but the BlackJack was more interesting. Besides, we all know BlackJack is the only game you’re statistically likely to even have a tiny chance of winning something. Yeh, I know it’s not the point of gambling.. just to have fun. But still I’d rather wait until I was more financially stable first. That’s not likely to happen until I get the house sold.

Friday I drove Lisa to Tweed Heads and came back. I spent most of the afternoon mowing and whippersnippering the yard. I ended up covered in chopped up weeds and grass but the house looks heaps lots nicer than before. That night, Striker turned up and his friends wanted him to go to the Casino. I had already been the night before and was bushed from all the work. Striker wasn’t really keen on it anyway so we piked and stayed home watching "My name is Earl" until about 1am. Then I went to bed and he watched a few more shows.

Saturday morning I woke at 8am and had breakfast while Striker slept. I woke him at 11am and we headed to Super Cheap Auto so Striker could pick up some stuff for his car. We also went to Crazy Clark’s discount store and picked up some cleaning equipment and chemicals. Lisa told me she wanted to help me clean up the house to make it more inviting to potential buyers. After that, we headed to Surfer’s Paradise to go extreme jetboating. The driver’s young daughter was there and told us all about the jetboating. They said she’s going to make a great sales girl. hehe. We had a fantastic time doing 360’s and jumps and bumps. There was a grandma in the front seat whom seemed a bit worried at times and kept looking back at her family in the back of the boat while holding onto her straw hat to make sure it didn’t fall off. hehe. We sped past a Photographer’s boat and did a 360. He took photos of us to sell at the jetty when we got back. Striker bought one of them for $10. When we arrived back at the jetty the driver asked for someone to hop out and tie the boat to the jetty. I volunteered Striker and he got a free cap for his troubles After that, we went to Pacific Fair for some late lunch (about 3pm). We both had some burgers, chips and drinks from Oporto. We grabbed some chocolate easter eggs from Coles and headed home. A quick drop-off of our stuff and we headed up to Mount Gravatt. We waited there for a while and jumped into Striker’s friend’s car and headed for Toowong Cemetery. We were there for a night time Ghost Tour. It was a full moon as well, so rather apt for the situation. We were on a ghost tour with Jack Sim’s Ghost Tours. We had a fantastic time learning the history of various tombs and people and finished a couple of hours later around 9:30pm. I bought a signed book called "Haunted Brisbane" and had Jack sign it for me. He was a fantastic tour guide. Really gave you the right feeling and mood for the tour. He had the sinister methods of describing the events and also a sinister laugh heh. We finished up there and headed back to pick up my car then Striker and I headed back to Nerang. We popped in to visit a couple of his friends not far from my place, but by midnight I was so exhausted I said we had better leave. We came home and he watched more Earl while I snoozed the night away.

I woke at around 8:30am and had breakfast then headed off to pick up Lisa again. We came back and scrubbed the house. She did a really good job. Me, being a guy, did a somewhat decent job. hehe. We watched Serenity then some conspiracy shows like "911 in plane site" and "Loose change". We headed out and Striker had to grab a 6 pack of FourEx Gold from Dan Murphy’s to swap for a set of tyres for his car. We drove up to Loganholme Hyperdome to drop off Lisa at Hungry Jacks where she was meeting a friend of hers from Brisbane. Striker and I had a chocolate sundae each while we waited and chatted. Once Lisa had met her friend, we headed back home again. Striker grabbed his gear and jumped in his car and headed off for Caboolture to see his friends then off to Noosa to get some new tyres.

I like the look of the new Mac OSX and would be tempted to ‘Switch’ if only I didn’t have to shell out for another whole PC. If I could run it on my Asus / AMD / nVidia machine I reckon I’d switch soon. ( Except for the fact I have just bought Oblivion and it doesn’t run on OSX … yet ). I like the idea of virtualization, though. If that becomes stable enough and fast enough ( near native speed ) OSX becomes even more tempting.
I have a theory though. I think Apple are testing the water at this stage and that’s why they have ‘locked down’ their system to Intel / ATI. It gives them a stable system with known specifications to run their OS. If you know what CPU, chipset, graphics card, etc your OS is running on you have two benefits: 1. You only need one set of drivers. 2. You don’t have to convince others to write drivers and hence don’t have people complaining about their hardware not working with your OS.
Microsoft have often said the main reason for most crashing and blue screens can be traced back to dodgy drivers. With OSX on known hardware you can concentrate on building a stable OS for now which also convinces people to ’switch’. Once you have a good, stable OS you can move onto providing drivers for other hardware devices and increasing your support for them, giving you a wider range.
I expect OSX to eventually support nVidia cards, other soundcards and other hardware in the future, but for now concentrating on providing a popular alternative to XP on a stable platform.
This is also why you can’t yet buy OSX ‘off the shelf’. Apple knows you would run it on hardware not in their official HCL, then they have a support nightmare. Especially with OSX in such early days on the Intel platform.
In the meantime, other programmers will work on writing drivers to get OSX running on their unsupported hardware. Apple can keep an eye on this to see how well it works and later unveil OSX for other platforms and hardware configurations.
Meanwhile the rest of us will keep an eye on Parallel, Q, VMware and Boot Camp to run those few required applications on XP when we have to. Until OSX gets greater market share, of course. Then companies will be more likely to program OSX native versions of their applications.