Jason Oakley : The life of an Aussie geek!

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.