life

Day-to-day events and activities.

Yowzers.

Posted by

9

The bite is nearly gone. It’s nearly only taken a week. I took photos of the mark with my phone camera the other day. When I can be bothered extracting them off the phone via infra red I’ll upload them so none of you will think I just made the whole story up for attention.

I’ve pumped out 38 pages of test cases so far for this project and still have to do more. I also have to finish off my test plan and schedule and string together a “requirements validation matrix”. This system had better bloody work and work well. If my group gets anything less than a distinction in this course I’ll go postal. I know I whinge about the work I’ve done, but some of the other folks have put a lot more effort and hours and sleepless nights in than me. They deserve to do really well.

We won Actionball tonight! 31-21. I got to play goal keeper, goal defense and wing defense. I was on fire as wing defense. I’d like to play that position again. I don’t mind goal defense either and I’ve been playing that position most games. Goal keeper is too boring for me. I don’t like having to mark up on one person in a small area. I prefer being able to roam around and be either an annoying, harassing defender or a bit of a playmaker/attack back up. Hopefully Pip, our supercoach, likes me in that role.

The shoes I’ve been wearing during the games seem to be giving me blisters. About 3/4 of the way through the game I thought I had a small, sharp stone inside my shoe. Nothing I did seemed to relieve the pain. After the game I started feeling around the sole of my foot inside of my sock and found there was something there to tug on. It turned out to be a piece of flappy, but still connected, skin. That was pleasant.

I don’t think I’ll be getting a whole lot of sleep tonight. I’ve already had two of my dangerously potent coffees today, which is probably the equivalent of 5-6 shots. Maybe I’ll brew another one in a little while. The process works well as both a way of procrastinating and a way of encouraging myself to keep working. Another motivator is that if I go to sleep it’ll feel like I have to go to my management accounting class “sooner”.

So, anyone else think it’s funny that the Smurfs got nuked?

TC0.0.0

Posted by

24

My brain is melting. I can’t keep it in a solid state long enough to continue writing these test cases for my project. Just thinking about it and having to finish it is making me feel lonely and depressed. I wish there was someone around so that I could drop all this and kill some time actually doing something fun.

I keep telling myself that it’s only a week to go. Not long. Unfortunately, time really is relative, the bastard.

At least I’ll have the chance to let my lack of hair down next Thursday night and party hard at the Winesoc ball. Then I get to wake up early and groggy and participate in my group presentation. Extremes are always fun. I just hope I wake up on the Friday. It’s actually quite irresponsible of me to go out to the ball, when I think about it. Fuck it. I’m still going.

The worst thing about my part of the project is that it’s not creative at all. Documenting anything is usually boring, unless you’re coming up with an idea and explaining how it’s going to work. I don’t even mind documenting things if I have a format to adhere to or questions to answer by doing it. Unfortunately for me, I just have to include everything I can think of no matter how mundane. To add to the insult, no one ever reads testing documentation at all. They just expect it to all be there.

My bug bite is still showing up on my arm. It’s not really that itchy any more. Only a little bit, I guess. I suppose the best way to describe it would be “it feels good if I scratch it”. There seems to be a small swollen bit of flesh underneath the skin where it was bitten. Holy crap, there’s actually two lumps! Maybe I’ve been impregnated by aggressive caterpillars. It could have been a centipede. I’m not sure.

It looked kind of like this thing but not exactly.

I really shouldn’t have scratched it again. Damn, why must it feel so good?

I can’t remember if I mentioned that /tofu/Scott bought a webcam last night. It’s kind of fun. I feel ashamed, though, as it brings me one step closer to that annoying stereotype of people on the net that I hate, especially since I somehow made myself establish MySpace and Hi5 profiles. :/

I don’t think I can ever forgive myself.

I Am A: Chaotic Good Half-Elf Fighter Mage

Alignment:
Chaotic Good characters are independent types with a strong belief in the value of goodness. They have little use for governments and other forces of order, and will generally do their own things, without heed to such groups.

Race:
Half-Elves are a cross between a human and an elf. They are smaller, like their elven ancestors, but have a much shorter lifespan. They are sometimes looked down upon as half-breeds, but this is rare. They have both the curious drive of humans and the patience of elves.

Primary Class:
Fighters are the warriors. They use weapons to accomplish their goals. This isn’t to say that they aren’t intelligent, but that they do, in fact, believe that violence is frequently the answer.

Secondary Class:
Mages harness the magical energies for their own use. Spells, spell books, and long hours in the library are their loves. While often not physically strong, their mental talents can make up for this.

Deity:
Tymora is the Chaotic Good goddess of luck and good fortune. She is also known as Lady Luck, and also Tyche’s fair-tressed daughter. Followers of Tymora believe in the tenent that, ‘Fortune Favors the Bold,’ and will throw caution to the wind and trust to luck to work things out for the best. Tymora’s symbol is an unmarked silver disk.

Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy ofNeppyMan (e-mail)

Ouch.

Posted by

13

Jesus. I was just bringing in my towel and swimmers from the line (I left them out overnight because I was lazy) and a little fucking caterpillar bit me on the forearm. Christ it stings. It’s come up in a big red patch instantaneously. I’m dying!

Scott just bought a webcam. Maybe now we can pick up over the Internet like we’ve always wanted to.

I had lunch today on my own in a restaurant. It’s the first time I’ve eaten alone in a food place that wasn’t a takeaway. I felt both grown up and lame at the same time. Thai Times 9. An old favourite haunt of ours when I actually had friends at uni. It was yum.

I’ve started my work on my project again. Yay for me. I’m also currently downloading the latest episode of Arrested Development. Even more yay. Before we watch it I’m forcing Scott to do a garbage run.

It’s nothing but excitement around here.

Poo.

Posted by

15

I’ve been trying to work out a nifty way to export all of my 223 previous LJ entries in to a nice RSS format in order to have them all catalogued on my site. I could reformat the XML I’ve exported, but I’d still lose the URLs to the entries themselves. It’s a shame there’s no “historical RSS feeds” to flick back to and use.

In order to attempt this, I tried out ljArchive, a nice little application that can connect to LiveJournal’s servers and download your entire posting history and the comments that were made with it. Very handy if you just want to skim through your history. It even has some mathematical models and graphs that it can draw up if you’re in to those sorts of things. I certainly find it entertaining. For a program that didn’t do what I wanted it to do, I quite like it. I just discovered that it can export your journal in to a MIDI file, too! Now I can hear my journal played as notes. Useless, but sexy.

I just got back from Newcastle and saw Grant, my mystical elf cousin/uncle. I arrived at Lake Macquarie around 3pm and we went up around Civic to check out the developments around the waterfront. Very impressive. He’s just bought a terrace house a short walk from there in Cooks Hill. It’s a cute little place. We ended up watching the NRL final back at the shack with some Italian takeaway and had a few quiet drinks. We retired at around 10pm and I failed to get more than 1 hour of solid sleep at any one time, leading to my decision to sleep in until 9am instead of getting up at 6am like I’d originally intended.

This morning, at 9am, I got up and sat outside for a while after drinking the short black Grant made me at around 8am. I guess it took a while to hit me. It’s always pleasant just sitting out on the bench at the shack and doing nothing but enjoying the view of the lake. There’s something innately peaceful about the whole experience. How wannabe-artistic do I sound? Geez.

I zipped over to Caves Beach before heading off and had a dip. There was no surf at all and I was a little cold just standing around in the water so it wasn’t long until I showered off some of the salt and sand and got back in the car and made my way back down the highway and freeway to Hornsby. I wanted to beat the holiday traffic and left Swansea at 10am. I hit the Pacific Highway at Hornsby at 11am. Quite a good run.

On the way home I stopped in at Lou’s to give her a birthday card. I thought it was a rather appropriate one and felt impressed with myself for finding it. Self-congratulation is fun. It was nice being able to see her again and things seemed to go pretty well. The whole thing was reassuring, to say the least. Hopefully, if we manage to keep getting along like that I think things should be fine. I believe she’s drinking punch at the moment with her girlfriends. I could go for a fruity mix myself. I don’t believe I shall, though.

I’m spending the rest of the day preparing myself psychologically to sit down and completely dominate the work I have left for my project – tomorrow. I’ve always been a crammer and rather than fight against my nature I’m just going to ride with it then capitalise on my skills when the time is right. I feel so insightful.

Speaking of insight, it’s only been this last week that I’ve noticed a whole new side of music. I suppose I can now relate to a lot more themes in songs these days. Honestly, it feels kinda good. I’ve always been an experience junkie like that.

redknob.net

Posted by

20

Well, I sort of set up redknob.net a bit better. Courtesy of Drupal. There’s really no point trying to make a website from scratch these days, unless it has some uber special personalised requirements. I don’t.

Managing it is taking a little getting used to. The way it handles content was a little confusing at first but I think I’ve basically gotten the hang of it.

I kind of like the basic white theme that I’m running on it, even though it’s virtually an unedited stock/default theme that comes with the installation. Simplicity and minimalism are certainly a turn-on for me.

I’m actually writing this entry just to see if I have the crontab working properly (a script to update aggregated content). If I did it right, I shouldn’t have to do anything for this entry to appear on my LiveJournal syndication.

I’m going up to Newcastle on Sunday afternoon to visit my uncle (although he’s technically my cousin), Grant. He’s been living at the shack for a little while now and wanted me to come up and visit him. He wants to have a bit of a man-to-man I think after everything that’s happened. I’m actually looking forward to it. It’ll be nice to talk to someone older who’s not one of my parents about things for a while.

My part of the RailCorp project has pretty much ground to a halt over the last week. I have trouble getting motivated to do any work in general, let alone after having a depressing week. I really should be doing something on it now instead of fucking around with a new website, but it’s still hard to concentrate on anything too important. Maybe I’ll take a swipe at it on Saturday night. I was planning on trying to do a little bit on Sunday morning before I left, too. Knowing me, I probably wont.

I just can’t wait for this year to be over. I’m a little scared but still curious as to both what the world has in store for me and what I have in store for the world, now that I’m basically going to be set loose from everything.

To refer to the RPG analogy: I’m not going to be questing. I’m just filling out the map.

Ding.

Posted by

7

[13:36:44] <@dot|redknob> man
[13:37:01] <@dot|redknob> my life is going to be as frustrating as a fucking rpg now
[13:37:09] <@dot|redknob> an open ended rpg
[13:37:23] <@dot|loknlowd> emo
[13:37:25] <@dot|loknlowd> ;o
[13:37:26] <@dot|redknob> nah
[13:37:29] <@dot|redknob> scared :o
[13:37:36] <@dot|loknlowd> !!
[13:37:37] <@dot|redknob> we all know how i never get through open rpgs
[13:37:41] <%bubs> ./install u7
[13:37:44] <@dot|loknlowd> lol
[13:37:52] <@dot|redknob> and in the next few weeks i’m going to have total freedom to do what i want
[13:37:58] <@dot|redknob> no ties at all
[13:38:01] <@dot|redknob> no uni
[13:38:02] <@dot|redknob> no gf
[13:38:09] <@dot|redknob> free to leave the country
[13:38:12] <@dot|redknob> money to spend
[13:38:35] <@dot|redknob> i guess i’ll just go wandering
[13:38:40] <@dot|redknob> see where i end up
[13:38:49] <@dot|redknob> fortunately i don’t know how to pick locks
[13:38:52] <@dot|redknob> or i’d never get anywhere

Arghhhhh.

Posted by

3

This is killing me. I probably shouldn’t be writing this in a public entry but I’m going insane not being able to talk to Lou. She can probably see this anyway. Hi there.

Some stuff she’s said has made me confused and I’m not sure if it’s just because if I’m too stubborn or it just wont sink in or what. I need to talk but she wont yet.

It’s seriously fucking me up. I don’t want to be harassing her though. Arghhhhhh.

I’m in one of those shitty limbo states at the moment and as usual have no control over it whatsoever.

Shopped.

Posted by

33

Does my face look like it got photoshopped on to my own head in this?

On another note, I finally bought some of my own webhosting on PowWeb. Now redknob.net has a real home.

It’s not much to look at, but hopefully it will be.

I’ll admit it, I’m only doing it so I can become a billionaire from Google AdSense.

In regards to breaking up with Lou: I’m feeling better. After thinking about some of the things she’s said to me over the last few days I can see what she was talking about and why she wanted to break up… So, yeah. My understanding is increasing.

Wow.

That's all folks.

Posted by

2

Well, there goes my 1-word-title convention. I thought I needed something to mark the occasion.

Lou and I just broke up this afternoon. It was amicable.

I’m disappointed at the result but I’m glad there’s been closure.

Thanks for the memories, .