WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

Well yesterday some time while I was at work iiNet disconnected my phone line in preparation for Naked DSL. Once that is completed (est 2-3 weeks) I will have a phone line with no line rental and just Broadband on it with VOIP for telephone.

The VOIP will be quite handy because…

“iiTalk is a broadband phone service included free with every Naked DSL plan . It lets you make calls to fixed phone lines (and VOIP) Australia-wide for nothing.”

Free phone calls Australia wide. Nice. Pity I don’t make many calls but if I ever did I don’t have to worry about how much it’ll cost I might phone my parents from time to time or my sister. Everyone else talks to me on the internet anyway via chat or email.

I phoned ‘3′ yesterday and had Broadband added to my mobile phone account. Unfortunately, they only work in Billing Cycles so it won’t be enabled until Tuesday. That means I have no landline nor internet until Tuesday. Well, technically I can use Broadband through my  phone right now.. at ridiculously high rates for casual use.

Is there nothing this guy can’t do?

While the Liberals were in we had a drought. Now that K-to-the-Rudd is in, it’s raining all the time

Hooray for Krudd!

Last Sunday Sienna and I went to a concert put on by Catherine’s singing teacher. The teacher had some kids she has been teaching and wanted to put on a concert to show off their skills to a small crowd.  She invited Catherine along to sing a song to break up the kid’s songs for something different. Catherine sang “Fever” (aka You give me fever). It was really the first time I’ve heard/seen her sing so it was a really nice experience. She sang it well. Even Sienna said “Wow! Catherine sings good!”.  We stayed and saw all the acts then the whole lot got together and sang a couple of songs as well.

Tomorrow night Catherine and I are going to see Beowulf 3D at the cinema. Mil tells me it should be called “World of Warcraft in 3D”. I guess it was okay though. Will tell you in a couple of days.

Catherine let me have her old Soundblaster PC. It’s 933MHz Pentium III with 256mb RAM. I put my 120Gb Western Digital hard drive in it which already had Mandrivalinux 2006 installed. I had to configure X86Config but once that was done it booted up nicely. I made a few configuration changes and it’s working wonderfully. I guess I should see if some config files can be based off the Interface instead of static IP ranges.  It works well for the low specs and even runs XviD files at full screen with no problems, stutters or skips. So I’m way happy with that.

I bought 2Gb of DDR 400 RAM for my own desktop PC. 1Gb just doesn’t cut it. I took out the two 512Mb DDR 333 chips and put in two 1Gb’s. It seems somewhat smoother to use now.

Yey :-/

Go do it or give the gubberment more munnies!

Swimming lessons are over for another week. Might go to the kids indoor playground later. Was going to head down to the Goldie but it’s Schoolies so there goes that idea.

They reckon it will rain all weekend but it’s clear and sunny at the moment. Rained earlier tho.

Not much of a blog post. Byte me!

Yesterday morning Sienna and I got up and went to the shops. We popped into Crazy Clarks to get her some $4 shoes to wear out Geocaching, so her good ones would not get dirty. We also picked up some Christmas decorations for the Christmas tree. Sienna picked them all out herself. We also got some chocolate money

From there, I typed in the street address of a Geocache and we went off to find it. We found it in less than 10 minutes and headed off to the second one which we also found quickly. You can read about it on my Geocaching blog.. link to the left there.

We came home and decorated the tree while lunch was cooking.

Not a great quality photo, but you get the idea. Sienna had fun helping me decorate the tree, then she put her chocolate money underneath and had me come out of the kitchen to look at the presents Santa put under the tree hehe. We ate our lunch (chicken and chips with vegetable fingers) while watching The Simpsons, then it was off to bed for Sienna. She rested and I caught up on The Sideshow TV show with Paul McDermott as the host.

When Sienna awoke we played some games and then it was time to take her home to mummy’s house. We drove there and I dropped her off then headed over to Catherine’s place for the night. I taught her 5 card draw poker and we had a nice night drinking Mount Pleasant red wine and playing cards. We also caught up on a couple of episodes of Angel and ate Mexican for dinner.

Today Lil Dwarfette and I went to Crazy Clark’s and picked up some cheap shoes for her to wear so it doesn’t matter so much if they get dirty.

We hopped into the car and I typed the street name of the first cache into my Navman S50 GPS navigator and off we went. She was letting me know after every time the navigator told us to “turn left in 500 metres” etc hehe. We got near where we had to be then turned around and went back to a car park near a playground. We jumped out and I set the coordinates into my handheld GPSr (why don’t the Navman devices let you put in Longitude/Latitude?) *Sigh*

Off we walked following the little arrow. We walked along to a walkway which went up a bit of a slope. I thought the cache might be underneath it, due to the clues in the cache page, but it wasn’t. We did see a bluetongue lizard in the grass and then went back onto the pathway. When the GPSr said we only had about 2metres to go, I went hunting around while Lil Dwarfette stayed on the walkway. I found the cache rather easily and dropped in a snowman and took a little whistle for Lil Dwarfette. She was so excited. We headed off to the playground and she had fun with the kids for about half an hour.

Cache found: Oxley - Pamphlett by Crew 153 (GCQ6E7)

Next, we jumped back in the car and I typed in the next location into the Navman and off we drove again. This time we got there very easily and hopped out and followed the arrow. It was obvious where the cache would be — again from the clues — so we walked straight to it. I looked in all the obvious locations where it wasn’t until I was nearly frustrated and nearly kicked the damn cache! Oh! There it is. Easy as pie lol! We opened it and she took out a flowerly lei and we dropped in some Xmas gift tags, wrote in the book and drove off again to home to decorate our Christmas tree.

Cache found: Ashes to Ashes by happyharries (GCYN08)

A really great day out for both of us. Lil Dwarfette is tired out and having a nice sleep now.

I’ve started playing Texas Hold’em Poker online at Pokerstars again. Scott invited me back. I am going to try playing with real money. Not much, but it might be fun for a change.

This morning Sienna and I woke up early so we headed to the shops.  We went to Target and bought her some new swimmers and a new Dora the Explorer dress. I bought myself some work shoes as well since I could find nothing suitable at the Target in Queen St Mall.  We came back home and she got changed then we went to her new Swimming School. She really loved it there but the lessons are only 15 minutes long. Weird.  I think it’s because they are only open until 12pm on the days they are open so they keep them short. Even Sienna noticed. She came out of the lesson and asked to go back in again.  We came home and had some lunch and I had to go to work in the city.  I would have preferred to go to a play at Catherine’s theatre. There was a kids one on today but work needed someone to help move a server and I forgot about the play anyway.  We turned up at 1:30pm which is when we were supposed to move the server but they weren’t ready. We waited around until 4pm before they were organised enough for us to move it, then we had to wait around for another half hour or so until everything was tested.  By the time we got home it was 6pm *Sigh* NOT HAPPY JAN! I get a bunch of TOIL time though.

We had some *eurgh* MacDonalds food while waiting and so when we got home we watched some of Happy Feet and Sienna went to bed.  I’m watching A New Hope Star Wars movie on TV while playing Poker.  Let’s hope tomorrow is more interesting.  I did find an advertising brochure for a kids indoor playground not too far from home so I might take Sienna there tomorrow. It’s only $5 for the whole day, but we won’t stay that long.