WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

Hmm.. that’d be ’sweet’

Another day has dawned.

I didn’t take Sienna swimming yesterday morning as I woke up to the sounds of a chesty cough at 6am (yawn). She stayed asleep until 7:30am, which is unusual for her, so we didn’t do too much. I gave her some Panadol a couple of times. Might give her some more soon. Still a bit warm.

Around 10am we headed down to the shops. I had a look for a doorbell but they are about $35 so I might just get a replacement battery for the one I already have. It’s just looking rather old from being out in the sun. Plastic doesn’t tend to do well in direct sunlight. I also checked out some curtains but didn’t know the size of the window they would fit so went home and measured and went back to shops. A pity cos I had found a carpark spot right next to the front door Well, when I got back a lady saw me looking for a spot and pointed at her car. We waited til she pulled out (sounds like a pregnancy prevention method).

I went back to Target as they had a sale 20% off curtains and accessories. I went through the small range and selected a couple of curtains 120 by about 213cm. My window is 250cm so it was close enough. I did buy a curtain rod, but will keep it until I get my own place as I’m not sposed to put holes in the walls in this rental. So.. I .. um.. got inventive and used fishing line to tie the new thicker darker curtains to the existing curtain rod over the existing curtains It still wasn’t good enough so I put a black sheet over the top of that again. Now the room is nice and dark instead of looking like midday at 5am!

We got a few groceries. Sienna needed some more pasta (or “pasta more” as she calls it). This type she calls “pasketti”. I got some steaks and oven mix vegetables to have a real meal at some stage.

We had some lunch while there as well. Sienna wanted “Chicken chippies” - Chicken and chips, but I got a plate at the Asian food shop and served ourselves the types of food we like. Then, we just shared the plate between us. No point in paying $7.00 for her when she doesn’t eat that much. Just get one $8.50 plate and stack it on!

I really have to get back into exercises this week. I haven’t done any for about 1.5 weeks. It started raining a while ago so I didn’t go since the dirt track I run down would be muddy. What an excuse hey? Also all the Oporto I’ve been eating lately… I’ve been bad. Time to get back into it. Once you start it’s okay, but if you stop it’s hard to convince yourself to start again. I’m not the best one for motivating myself.

Will see how Sienna is feeling today and maybe take her to the park for some fun. It’d be nice to get out of the house at any rate. It’s looking a little overcast today tho so we shall see. Better not leave my clothes on the line too long either.

When I drop her off tonight at home I will clean up the house. I’ve been slack there, too. It’s just been one big slack week all over

Yea, well not to be one to do things by halves I shelled out $189 to get a new DVD player. The reason for the high (in today’s standards) cost? It does HDMI upsampling and comes with a HDMI cable They are probably worth at least $80-$180 depending on the quality and length.

It’s a Samsung HD860 DVD player.

Samsung’s HyperVision DVD Players up-convert the resolution of ordinary DVDs to 1080p/1080i/720p High Definition - which means you’ll experience the video and audio quality you didn’t think was possible from a DVD player.

Samsung’s DVD Players deliver high-quality DivX images. Insert DVDs & CDs that have DivX images downloaded via a computer and enjoy watching them on the large-scale TV!

HDMI™ (High Definition Multimedia Interface) transfers Hi-Definition video and audio from your HyperVision DVD Player to your TV, home theatre or other digital AV components without loss of any digital signal. Simply connect your DVD Player to your home theatre system with a single HDMI cable for high quality pictures and sound.

Samsung’s DVD Players feature state-of-the-art 14-bit video DAC (digital-to-analog converter) and video processing running at 108MHz. The 14-bit DAC produces up to 16384 colour values, as opposed to 1024 with 10-bit processing, providing extended dynamic contrast and detail with natural and smooth gradiation between highlights and shadows. With the high speed 108MHz video processing, it boosts image resolution as close to the original DVD source as possible, allowing you to enjoy more life-like pictures!

* Advanced 14-bit Video DAC
* DVD/CD/VCD/SVCD /MP3/WMA/HD-JPEG Playback
* EZ View/Instant Replay/Instant Skip

I bought it from the Good Guys. It was advertised in the shop for $199 but they knocked $10 off it, as they do. So I was way happy.

Review

I also found out how to “Region Free” it…

I found that you don’t need to buy a remote use your Samsung remote

Make sure the player is switched on, and is at the Samsung logo
screen. Also check the tray is shut and that there’s no disc in the
player.

Now press the REPEAT button on the remote, followed by a five digit
code. This code is different depending on what region your player is
*currently* set to:

R1 - 29334
R2 - 38767
R3 - 56732
R4 - 76884
R5 - 53814
R6 - 24462

So for example if you have an R2 player, press REPEAT-3-8-7-6-7.

If you’ve done this correctly (and your player is compatible with the
hack), you should see a number at the top left corner of the screen
corresponding to the current region.

Now, pressing any number from 1 to 6 will change to the corresponding
region. Or, press 9 for “auto-region” mode.

Next, press OPEN/CLOSE to open the tray, followed by Standby (or DVD
POWER) on the remote to close it and put the player into Standby mode.
The next time you turn your player on, the new region will be set.

Don’t forget that if you want to hack it again, you’ll need to use a
different code, as listed above. If it’s currently set to “region 9″,
use the code for the last *proper* region you set it to.

From VideoHelp.

I think I’ve been slack with this blog now I’ve got my MySpace one.
This is supposed to be my main one, but now the other has been getting a really good go.
The MySpace one is going to only be about me. This one, I’ll share about Sienna as well.

I picked her up late after work on Friday night as I went out for a Chinese dinner. I got her just before 8pm and had to go the long way round since the ferry had long stopped transporting cars. On the way home on the motorway, I followed behind a big 4WD. Then I saw them turn on their DVD player with a screen about 7″ in size. I saw straight away that it was Futurama playing so sped up to see if I could recognise the episode. Well, travelling at 100km/h you don’t tend to get TOO close and so seeing much on a 7″ screen was impossible. I kept squinting but my telescopic lens would not bring the image any closer to my retina. Eventually they took a side road and I said “Hey you suck! I was trying to watch that!”.
I was lucky there was a service station not far from the train station where my car is parked during the day as my bladder was full of Coke Zero before I got on the train. I had only JUST made the train and so could not use the facilities at the station. By the time the train pulled in about 40 mins later I was ready to burst.

Saturday morning was the usual trip to swimming and Sienna had fun splashing around, floating on her back and practising overam strokes while holding a kickboard. I had hoped they would serve coffee in the shop, but of course a swimming centre only sells ‘healthy’ stuff like lollies, carbonated drinks and chips. *sigh* They’d clean up if they offered to sell coffee to parents whom have only just woken up and dragged themselves down to the centre.

We came home and showered then went to the local shopping centre and bought a Maccas breakfast. I don’t normally eat at Maccas EVER if I can help it, but I had no milk at home and cbf having some toast, so I had to skip coffee as well.
I bought a breakfast for myself and a hash brown with apple for Sienna. Unfortunately the hash browns were cold. Not frozen, but cooked and cooled right down. I was too tired to bother arguing and had sat far away from the fast food stand so just ate it anyway. The coffee wasn’t great but it beat no coffee at all
We did our shopping and I checked into the local bottle shop for some red wine as I’m running out (I usually have a couple glasses at night). It also helps loosen my vocal chords for LibriVox. Only the local little shop just has El Cheapo Vino for up to $15 per bottle and the oldest is about 2004. I’ll have to visit a BWS (Beer Wine Spirits) store during the week and stock up.

We came back home and unpacked. Later that afternoon I was to meet a friend (Teddy aka Tharyn) who had flown down from Rockhampton on her way south. She had a stopover for a few hours in Brisbane and had asked me to come catch up with her and see her new bub.
Well, my alarm on my phone went off at 2pm but I didn’t hear it. By 2:45pm I had noticed the alarm and bundled Sienna into the car only to discover the next train was 7 mins away and we’d never make it. We took the train after that at about 3:25pm and got to Central at 4pm. We changed trains. Well, we were GOING TO change trains but by the time we got to the main concourse and back down again to the other platform the doors were shutting on the Airport train. The next one wasn’t until 4:32pm. So we waited. Soon it became apparent that it wasn’t arriving until about 4:37pm and by the time it would get us to the airport it would be after 5pm. Since Tharyn’s flight was boarding at 5:15pm there was no longer any point, so I rang her and we headed home.
We grabbed some Triple Ripple Meatasaurus Dominos Pizza and headed home.

Today it rained. I had some things on the line, but luckily my main (first) washing load had already been taken off the line, so I raced out and grabbed the now-damp clothes and hung them up in the garage on my makeshift line.
I already had another load in — mostly towels and chair covers — so once they were done I added them to the garage line.

Since it was raining, I had one of those cartoon lightbulbs appear over my head and backed the car out of the garage into the soft, light downpour. I then went back in and grabbed my big car sponge and went out in my shorts and washed the car in the rain. It’s about the best way to do it during our drought. The car looks nice and clean now and it looks like I will have to mow the lawn again pretty soon.

I took Sienna back home tonight and recorded another chapter of a book for LibriVox. I had done two earlier today while Sienna slept, so I’ve had a lot of reading today. They aren’t short chapters either, so it’s been a bit of a slog, but fun all the same. You can see some links to recordings I’ve done on my “VOX” page linked on the left, there. They are mostly short poems. The stories I’ve read have only been chapters in the middle of books so no point linking until other people finish their chapters as well.

Now, it’s off to bed for me!

You may remember I used to post a lot about playing Second Life. I did enjoy the game quite a bit. I haven’t had any broadband for many months, which you would have also seen. But, now that I do I cannot get into Second Life.

My account is locked out. A friend tells me that Second Life had a security scare (well many) so they forced everyone to reset their passwords and locked all accounts. Well, logging onto the game gives an error that the account is locked and “Please go to this webpage to reset your account”. When you do it emails a link to reset your password. However, when you click the link it says “Please contact Tech Support” as the link doesn’t work.

I emailled them and after a week (!) they said they couldn’t help me via email and that I had to ring up.

Well, I woke up early Saturday morning and called them (USA time was about 4pm). The announcement was there is a “5-6 minute delay”. I stayed on the line for 10 minutes when it dropped to Voicemail and asked to leave a message, so I rang back again and the same thing happened (no 5-6 minute delay.. it’s much longer) and eventually it timed out again and dropped to Voicemail (Lucky it’s a Toll-free number!). I left a message.

A few days later I still had not heard back so did it all over again. Only this time I rang back another 4 times and was on hold 10 minutes each time until it dropped out. 5-6 minutes seems rather an understatement. After the last call I left a message again with my character name, my real name, my phone number and a description of the issue.

I’ve still not heard back after all this time. No emails. No phonecalls (I left both my mobile and home number). They just ignore Tech Support requests all together.

Well, SL chews up a TON of bandwidth and since I only have 2Gb per month I may as well give it a miss. The only way back in is to create a new character, which isn’t that big of an issue since there was only two people I really talked to in the game.. one rarely and one often.. but I don’t think I’ll bother.

It used to take me 6 months to earn my cheque from Google Adsense. Now it’s taken over a year and I still haven’t earned enough.

The pages get updated enough and I’m sure the stats will show the website gets as many hits as ever, but there aren’t many clicks on the Adsense banners.

I’m guessing the reason is browsers with built-in ad blockers actually block non-annoying ads such as the Google ones. You would think they’d be left out of filters since they aren’t in flash and don’t chew all your bandwidth, but I guess there are people around whom still would not like to see them. Unfortunately I was using the money for web hosting and domain registration etc.

I hope you get lots.

Of whatever it is you like to get.

When it is a day such as today.

Or maybe you abhor commercialism.

In which case you are a cheapskate.

Roses are red. Violets are blue. I’m really horny and so are you!

Let’s get bizzeh!

Your eyes are like two limpid pools of loveliness, your hair is like a golden waterfall. Plus those short skirts you wear make me really horny.

I didn’t do a heck of a lot over the weekend. Too damn hot again. My airbed ended up springing a couple (few?) holes and even though I duct-taped one, I didn’t find (or search for) any others. I ended up pulling Sienna’s mattress out and she slept on the couch. At least we were both cool enough to sleep.

Last night, instead of going to Poker, I stayed home and cleaned the place up. I got all the stuff off the floor and also cleaned off the kitchen bench which tends to automatically attract all sorts of rubbish and crap. I then caught up with a couple episodes of House. Well, one in the end since I’d already seen the other. Place looks great tho.

We had some super(un)healthy Dominos pizza for lunch then dinner. It was delicious and no doubt dripping with calories n stuff heh
YOU HAVE GOOD PIZZA YES? I WOULD LIKE TO ORDER PIZZA!

Tonight I recorded another chapter of a book. This time it was “The Clue of the Twisted Candle” by Edgar Wallace. It’s a mystery story. Once it’s finished I’m gonna download the whole book and burn it to audio CD for my parents to listen to. I’m sure they will enjoy it. Mum is particularly a mystery buff, including Hercule Poirot and Agatha Christie, among others.

At the moment, I’m ripping my Wendy Rule CDs to iTunes to listen to on the way to/from work. Haven’t listened in ages. I only found two cds but I’m sure I bought more. Will have to look around some more.

Lightning

This afternoon Sienna and I sat outside on the concrete and watched the incoming storm. Not enough rain to get excited about but the most interesting we’ve seen the sky since forever.

This morning we went swimming and at lunch we drove off to pick up a pizza from Dominos. Triple ripple base with bbq meatlovers (or meatasaurus or whatever) and some spicy ‘chicken kickers’. (basically overpriced nuggets with ranch dressing).

Didn’t get a lot else done since it’s been so hot again. I was ready to head back to sleeping in the bedroom but not quiet yet. The AC still has a job to do!

The last couple of days I’ve been putting my MySpace profile back together. Check it out at http://www.myspace.com/waulok and No, I didn’t just put it there to link to Mil’s one

You may be able to tell I have some new links to the left there. Well, I’ve had a request from a friend in the past to mention new links in my actual blog so if they use an RSS application they can click the link to visit the page instead of viewing my page with a non-AdBlock’ing browser and click on my Google Ads so I can get money for hosting my websites

Here goes…

The first new link is a blog by “me bestest ever pal” Mil! Go check out her site and read about her holidays, her feet (!) and doing stage dives at concerts.. along with her various reptilian minions.

The second is “Librivox“. It’s my latest hobby (or craze.. or whatever). Add it to the list! Let’s hope this one lasts longer than my others. I really think it will since I enjoy it so much already and I’ve only made two recordings so far. There’s an associated link to “Vox” in my Pages list on this site. There’s nothing there yet, but I aim to link to my various recordings in the future. Mostly after they have been completed formally.
LibriVox works in several different ways. You can read a whole story/book/poem yourself. You can be part of a book reading group where a book is chosen, you pick the chapters you wish to vocalise and upload and once everyone has completed their chapters, the story is stitched together and made available online for free. You can read a short poem and upload it along with everyone else. This way everyone gets to record their own interpretation .. around 20 readers. The first choice I made was to read two parts of a play called “This side of Paradise” by F Scott Fitzgerald. I played “Alec” and “Ryder Dawson”. I tried to make them sound different, but I’m not so sure.. particularly since this was my first recording. I’m sure it’ll improve with practise. I will link to the completed story as soon as a couple of other parts have been completed and the story stitched together. I will mention it on this blog and also link from the “Vox” page. Keep an eye out.

With my experience of volunteer radio announcing at three radio stations, plus vocal training at same and also a Voiceover class I took in Sydney for a while, I know this is my calling and it’s something I really enjoy doing and aim to do many many recordings.

I had a pretty so-so day today at work, so it was a nice change to get out and have some fun with an acquaintance of mine.

We went to a Sushi bar and picked some random fishbits to munch on with WASSSSSSSSSSSAAAAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBBBBBBBIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII and soy sauce. mm very nice! My wasabi got diluted down with lashings of soy sauce dammit!

Next it was off to BCC cinemas to watch Blood Diamond. It was quite a good movie.. a lot better than I had expected it to be. Very enjoyable. I guess I should give it 4/5 and just do that for all movies since my opinion has been declared invalid Nah! I’ll give it hmmmmm 3.5/5 just cos I can. Mil was happy enough. There were lots of explosions and chases to keep her entertained. She’ll probably give it 5/5 just for that hehehe

Leonardo’s accents were bearable even if they didn’t seem quite real coming from him, but no doubt that’s from seeing him in other movies and he sure didn’t have a South African accent in those. And and and it had JENNIFER CONNELLY in it! Man she certainly has grown up a lot and looking leaner these days. It’s a good thing. I promise I wasn’t checking out her side-boob shots in the movie.. honest… you believe me, don’t you? I still have a thing for her that I’ve had ever since Labyrinth and only increased during Dark City. (Hmm double entendre time).

I had a medium coke zero and popcorn and some green choc-mint choctop icecream which looked like it had a big knob on the end (double entendre all the way baby — I think she’s corrupting me. I never used to be so rude, did I? )

Not much of a headliner for non-fans of Family Guy. Hmm.. I never realised how good these Gu-Gurt tubes taste until I saw “Try them frozen!” on the side. So I did. Yum! Great for cooling down after a half-hour jog. Sienna always got me to buy the tubes and she ate them so I figured I’d try one frozen.
I read in the Sydney Morning Herald website about a new study into weight-loss exercise. Some people tested a theory. You sprint for eight seconds then walk for twelve then sprint 8 walk 12. Apparently people lose a lot more weight this way. Well, I’ve been doing it for the last week. The first couple of days I could not even walk afterwards. In fact, the next day at work I was walking like I’d been riding a horse for a week. The worst part was walking downstairs. But, now I try to exert more and sprint harder, building up the muscles. I don’t know if the weight-loss part is working as I have no scales and don’t want to get into anal ‘weigh yourself every day and agonise” mode so I do it more for the exercise. Building up strong lungs is always good as well.

Yesterday morning we jumped on my pushbike and rode a couple of kilometres down the roads to a new park near the shops where we hadn’t been before. Sienna saw the park and got excited so we stopped for about 40-45 mins and played on all the stuff there. There’s more bigger things to play on so I could get on them with her more than when we went to the park closer to home. We might make it a weekly event as Sienna seemed to enjoy it immensely. When we got home we had a bath and when I pulled the plug out the bottom of the bath was black.. like mud-covered! You have to admit that’s a good indicator of a fun time!

In the morning we weeded out the front garden near the door. Sienna did some digging with the garden trowel poppy gave her at Christmas time. (Not a Xmas gift but she loved it when he let her play with it so she got to keep it. I had broken my plastic one anyway. She said I could share her new one with her sometimes).

We also went shopping after lunch time. My landline home phones have been rapidly dying over the last few months so I decided to bite the bullet (ouch) and shell out for a new one. I looked in Tandy, K-Mart, Target, K-Mart, Target, Telstra. Target had a funky Telstra phone which looks like an iPod. Damn.. can’t find a photo of it online. Anyway.. it was $99 and I wasn’t quite prepared to pay the for one phone, no mattery how clone-y it looked. I ended up at Telstra where they had a funky Uniden down from $79 to $69.
So I bought it.

This morning we got up and went to Swimming lessons and had a fabulous time.

Last night I tried installing Windows XP Pro on my PC. I moved the old HDD with C: D: and E: on it to the Secondary IDE port and partitioned, formatted and installed Windows on the 200Gb HDD in the Primary IDE port. Unfortunately, Windows detected the other drive being NTFS first so assigned the SECONDARY HDD C: D: and E: and my 200Gb HDD’s first partition as G: for crying out loud!

So I shut it down and unplugged the 80Gb drive and reinstalled Windows XP Pro on the 200Gb HDD.

I put on a bunch of drivers and configured XP how I like it. While installing drivers it kept detecting the modem about 10 times (each time I hit cancel it’d come up again) until I went into the Device Manager and saw 10 PCI Modems listed with yellow (!) on them. I installed the WiFi drivers for my network card and rebooted. Now my modem was not listed at all and it would not detect. I moved the modem to a new PCI slot and Windows would not boot. I moved it back and Windows would not boot. I moved it to other ports and eventually removed it altogether and Windows would not boot. I pulled all cards out and Windows would not boot.

So I shut it down and reinstalled Windows XP Pro on the 200Gb HDD.

After it rebooted while installing it came up with STOP C0000221 bluescreen. I rebooted and it did it again. I rebooted and it said “UNKNOWN HARD ERROR in SystemVolume\Windows\NTDLL.DLL”. I rebooted and the same error showed up.

So I shut it down and reinstalled Windows XP Pro on the 200Gb HDD.

Same blue screens and DLL errors.

So I shut it down and reinstalled Windows XP Pro on the 200Gb HDD.

While formatting it to NTFS it said it could not format the Hard Drive and the HDD needed replacing so I tried it a few more times and gave up.
I even tried booting a bootable Simply Mepis and Gentoo DVD and neither would start.
I swapped in RAM from my other PC and it would not boot.
I changed HDDs and it would not boot.
Every 2nd reboot it’d say the BIOS settings had changed and the CPU was set to a SAFE MODE speed and I’d have to go into the BIOS and rest the CPU settings to the correct ones.

So I got the shits and went to the shop to return the DVD I was going to watch today but couldn’t since I didn’t have a DVD Player nor PC to watch it on. I went to the BWS alcohol shop to get a carton of vino to drown my sorrows and Sienna ran headfirst into a glass door she didn’t see open. Daddy said not to run in the shop, but what does Daddy know? We went to a BP station and bought big chocolate icecreams to make us both feel better.

I gave up and put all the HDDs into my more powerful PC which was going to be the games/media center PC and built Windows on that with no problems. So it seems the HDD didn’t need replacing after all.

Today my wireless landline phones finally died so I will have to buy new ones tomorrow no doubt. They say bad things happen in threes so the rest of the year is only going to be fantastic.. all the crap has already happened.

To be honest, I can’t blame the PC for not wanting Windows on it after having Mandriva Linux on it for so long, but the fact that it wouldn’t let me put Linux back on means either it’s just sulking or has gone to heaven.