I've been neglecting my LJ. For those that read this, I'm sorry.

I've been using twitter a lot these last few months, so I guess you could say I've jumped on the bandwagon. I don't like just posting my tweet stream on here as it just seems even more lazy than tapping out something original.

To me, twitter is better supported on mobile devices. It is more than just being able to post from my phone. Being able to take a photo and post it is stupidly easy.

Compare this to LJ. If I wanted to write a post and include a photo, I'd have to open a browser, upload it to a service (flickr/lj scrapbook/whatever), get the url, compose some html code and type it all up.

I know LJ really wasn't meant for on the fly, mobile posts (whereas twitter is). It has been a while since I looked at some clients and the web interface.

I would like to think LJ Scrapbooks ease of use and client range has been improved since I last used it. Not holding my breath. Last I checked the web interface was still the best way and that was still prone to the odd bug or two.

My habits have changed, there is no doubt about that. I would like to post more media on here, I'd just like to have a client that works and is easier to use than lj2me or the web interface.

Everything else in my life is great at the moment. Maybe more later when I have time to add some media?

I do like evenings with Jess just listening to light music. It somehow feels right not to watch what is given on fta TV.

Okay, I promised to update more often and I haven't. My bad.

Jess and I finally paid off the white goods credit card and then we went and bought a treadmill (Jess) and a new bike (for me). The new bike is so I can ride to work and back. I'm still figuring out the details (like, for example, how to arrive at work and handle sweat).

Because of this we've put back plans to purchase our car for about a week or so. We're pouring money back into the credit card to get it paid off quickly. Mainly because the bike will only have 2 months interest free. I'd say from about next week we'll be getting pre-approval for a car loan and doing some looking.

Also got Nokia's Sportstracker working, which is really neat (except that one the average speed is a lot lower because I forgot to stop it for about 10 minutes).

This also ties in with my food diary tracking using Calorie King (cheesy name, but surprisingly well built website). I started I think 6th July and now a month later, I can't seem to convince the scales that I weigh 106 kilograms anymore. It continues to say 104 kilograms. Does tracking my food intake work? Sure, when you're more than a little OCD like me and Jess. For my height and body weight, I would probably burn about 2000-2500 kcals per day. So I just have to keep my intake under that.

It seems to be working so far, but I'll continue to provide updates over the next six months or so.

In work news, I got my custom made tool roll back. It is awesome. It also cost me $125 AUD. Which is mighty expensive but I guess its worth it (I'll claim it back on tax). More annoyingly, I just found my Booq backpack I bought as my work tool bag, the shoulder straps on it have separated from the foam laptop padding (Pic here).

I was really excited about this backpack when I bought it. I don't think the straps will fall off or anything but it is annoying when I paid so much for it ($270 AUD) and everything else with it screams quality.

I'll contact Rushfaster and Booq about it. I think there could be improvements made to the design!

Jess and I have fallen in love with the idea of travelling on the Ghan at some point in the future ... when we have the $$$'s =)

Night!

Have been out west for the last few weeks. Will be out there for a couple more as one of our team went on holiday for three weeks.

Finally got rid of my old work phone, an LG TU550. Got a second hand Treo 750 and have jazzed up the winmo interface a bit to make it more bearable. The screen is also scratched badly so I got some screen protectors for it.

Finally got my tax done Fri night. We thought it might have been calculated wrong (and so I would have been in line for a bumper tax return) as I paid over 25% of my gross in tax. As it turns out, it was nearly spot on. I still have to pay the government about $245 in tax. Which isn't a bumper return but is still good.

Yesterday I went to a trivia afternoon organised by Thiess for charity. Our table came runner up in the main comp (free hair cut vouchers; I gave mine to Jess) and we won a secondary comp. I scored a bottle of wine and some Grand Marnier which Jess was very happy with. Apparently it is her favourite liquer? ;)

Yesterday and today my throat has been getting steadily more sore. So might be coming down with a cold. Will do my best to stave it off.

Bye!

Yeah, it has been. A good weekend though. We've decided that the month between mid-July and mid-August is going to be a month of sorting out financial stuff.

One of the big things is to sort out our superannuation and to get our wills sorted. I think the super fund I'm in (Sunsuper) isn't exactly the best so I'm going to do some research and switch.

At some point we'll also see if we can get a car loan so we can finally get a car for Jess. Its long overdue.

Other than that, not much more than the usual going on.

You know, I may only be young at 31, but working with people 10 years plus younger than me makes me feel old.

I wish I could imbue them with the enthusiasm for my job that I have. My cynical side tells me it would be a waste even if I could.

Their focus scatters too easily, they are unable to retain information and I wonder: surely I can't have been this bad? I don't remember being this unreliable at any job. I could be wearing rose coloured glasses though.

All I can say is it would be a treat to be able to work in a team of people I can depend upon.

Well I finally caved in and got a new phone. Not an iphone nor is it a winmobile handset.

So far, I've only come across a couple slightly annoying bugs on it (sorry, a Nokia N97). Other than that it has just been a joy to use.

I also finally got the flip minoHD I've been craving all year. Its not perfect (using the closed source, licensed 3ivx codec comes to mind) but it does youtube style, short video clips very well and in HD to boot (720p HD).

Suffice to say I'll be uploading a lot more videos to youtube from now on.

Thanks to everyone for their birthday wishes, really meant a lot this year. Nana, I'll try to post more often now I can do it practically anywhere.

Seeya!

Another day, another year, and I am 31. That's it, really. I'm off to the islands for a bit of work today.

You know, I just don't have that much to report. My style is more list style, so I'll give that a go again. I guess if LJ did powerpoint presentations I could present my life for the last three weeks in bullet points. (hehe)

• Bought a new tool bag - a backpack called the Booq Boa 3M. Very nice.


• Designed a new tool roll, will get it made up in the next week or so.


• Service Manager at work quit, which means I get to share with the other senior tech his duties from now in (something like 60/40 him/me)


• Tried the new Debian on my personal laptop. It worked, and I was getting happy with it, but then decided to try out Win7rc. It turns out the VGA in my laptop doesn't support Aero. Which makes Vista/Win7 not look its best.


• And no, I can't force Aero to turn on. I'll probably go back to linux in a couple months


• Oh, and Debian still doesn't recognise Internode's mirror as official. Might ask someone. There's probably a good reason, though.


• Lots of people we know have been having babies. MALE babies. Maybe its just me but shouldn't there be more female babies? Like a 50/50 ratio? Maybe there's more elsewhere that is making up for our little universe.


• Given up for now on voip. Couldn't find the right power supply for my PoE injector, I'll try and get a freebie from work one day.


• The mediaserver is powering along. Need to a) solve issue where fsck does an intensive check on all hdd on bootup b) install webmin so Jess can restart it without me present and


• c) at some point would like to exchange the linux mint 6 on there for debian 5.0. But then why fix it if it ain't broke right? RIGHT?

Would really like to leave Facebook. It just seems so pointless to me. The difference between FB & twitter doesn't seem like much on the surface - but in reality its a grand canyon. On FB, I've mostly only got people who I have actually met or people that I interact with daily. So content is mostly inane stuff that on the surface, I'm not that interested in. (Oh, you've done another survey/took some blurry photos from drunkenness last night/are now a fan of something intangible like laughter ... )

On twitter, I follow people who post stuff that I'm interested in - news, linux, tech stuff, programming, gadgets, etc. Its like digg on steroids.

Seeya.

Bah I've been getting the shits with my younger co-workers for a while now. They frustrate me because sometimes it feels like I am just following behind them cleaning up after them; cleaning up their paperwork, fixing their mistakes and finishing jobs they haven't properly completed.

I occasionally have a snipe at them about these things. It doesn't accomplish much beyond making me feel better and making them feel shit about the job they are doing. (A nasty one today was, "You guys keep doing what you're doing, because otherwise I would have nothing to do" or something close to that)

Which is obviously wrong. I do try to set a good example, but more often than not this is simply not enough. On a basic level, what I'm doing is negative and I know that by being positive, supportive and encouraging I'm more likely to see change. (Unless I turned into drill instructor - not going to happen)

So, I'm going to cease whinging about my co-workers shortcomings. If required, I'll provide direction and encouragement. I'll celebrate their wins and successes.

On a whim a couple weeks ago I bought a book (this book). It finally turned up on Friday afternoon, so I managed to get some time to read it on the flight down to Sydney and back on the weekend.

It has been a while since I've read a good non-fiction book (and had enough interest to want to read it all the way through). It became obvious to me quickly that my reading style has suffered since the last time. I find my mind wanders a lot when reading fiction yet I can still understand and follow the story without too much trouble.

It just does not work the same reading non-fiction. Paul Ekman's writing isn't as dry and wordy as some authors (the author I'm thinking of is on the tip of my tongue, I'll edit this post later when I remember his name), though it still requires attention and focus. Reading it has been difficult and time-consuming, mainly because I have to snap out of whatever tangent my mind has gone on and re-read the paragraph, section or sometimes several pages I've subconsciously read while off on a tangent.

The book is a good read so far. I've resolved that I will need to use a pen and underline some sentences and sections, make notes in the margins in order to remember some of the important things learned while reading it.

In short, my brain is feeling stimulated.

I've not seen a live performance for a while. I've considered going to some, but my thinking lately has been on the repetition.

A live performance of music seems to be these days just a repeat of whatever released song they are famous for. Where's the originality? The random covers? I don't hear of these things (but then, I don't go to live shows so I wouldn't know).

It has held me back anyway.

It'd be neat if there were a band (and knowing my ignorance, probably exists somewhere amongst the noise) that never played a song twice. It would be even better if they made every song sound completely different too.

I could picture myself at a live concert like that.

Oh, half the reason I've forgotten about LJ (apart from the several personal projects I've got running concurrently) is I signed up on twitter. I quite like the micro-blogging concept, and so LJ fell to the wayside a bit (from my usual).

On a separate topic, I realised today that when I had field days in Melbourne with the "Super Techs" (Douglas and Patrick) it really inspired me to work better, more efficiently, and in general try to be a better role model for the younger guys I work with (we have four techs all about 20 years old).

I can't begin to describe what it is like to be so passionate about something, then being able to hang out and learn all sorts of awesome stuff for three weeks with guys who are just as or even more passionate than I am. We really soaked up the information. Then on top of that, hanging out with two techs who just have their shit together.

So yeah, I guess I kinda look at those two guys as the sort of tech I aspire to become. The kids at work like to hang shit on me (they goad me with calls of, "Supertech Steve". They also wanted me to wear a cape o_O) but I hope that, and I know this sounds like a big inspirational bunch of blah, it inspires them a little bit.

That said, it has paid off today. I asked for, and got a hefty pay rise - pretty much no questions asked.

I just wish there was more awesomely geeky people to hang around with in Mackay (the usual suspects apply - Damo, Chris, Ali etc). Thats not saying anything about the non-geeky friends either. It would just be nice to be able to have someone I can trust to bounce geeky ideas off of occasionally and have them understand what I am talking about.

Righto thats me.

Note: I have noticed that most geeky blogs don't tend to crow about small, minor achievements like, for example, finding an obscure driver for a wireless card. But not having geeky people to bounce stuff off of does that. It wouldn't be important enough to blog about.

I've been busy with quite a lot of stuff over the last few weeks.

• Top-up training in Sydney again. Which was all sorts of awesome, we had a trainer who didn't bother with the press just explained various physics concepts to us all week.


• Have started selling all my old CD's on eBay.


• Been out of town a lot as well, but have also had some time working on the digital press


• Tried to go camping on Easter. It rained all weekend and we gave up after one night.


• Have been converting all my DVD rips to work on the mediaserver/ps3


• This has required finding the programs that will work with mpeg2 streams (vobs etc). Here's a few:
  
  
  
  • You can figure out for yourself how to rip DVD's.
  
  
  • DGIndex (Windows) /tcextract (Linux, part of transcode suite), for demuxing video and audio from .vob files.
  
  
  • Cuttermaran (Windows only), the only tool I could find which will allow you to cut/trim/whatever to mpeg2 streams (say for example your demuxed m2v/ac3 stream ...)
  
  
  • Muxman (Windows) /mplex (Linux, part of mjpegtools), both of these can mux mpeg2 and various audio type streams into an mpeg2 or vob file. mplex has much finer control over video/audio offsetting, unless you have the pro version of Muxman I would imagine.
  
  
  • Honorary mentions: VirtualDubMod (Windows), which can be used to cut, trim, demux, convert etc various video/audio streams (but not mpeg2 ...); BeSweet (Windows), for converting to/from ac3 and other audio stuff.
  
  
  • Am stoked about getting ffmpeg to transcode and mux - on the fly - demuxed audio commentaries from DVD's. IE - one large vob (the movie) - demux the audio track of commentary - and get ffmpeg to stream the vob with the ac3 flagged as the main audio. Result is what you expect - on the ps3.
  
  
  
  
• Have also been playing with some of the cool new features of mediatomb (svn) - Youtube channels, apple trailers, ffmpeg thumbnails and last.fm scrobbling. Apple Trailers works (it pulls down the info) but ffmpeg is having cries trying to transcode the stream ...


• Managed to read through Joe Haldeman's Forever War and its two related novels (Forever Peace and Forever Free) - I love the concepts of being able to cure aggression in mankind. Food for the brain.


• So haven't listened to much new music lately, best has been School of Seven Bells.


• Am pretty keen on getting into some form of programming again - will look into it


• I've also had a few days off when Jess got her right hand fixed. She was pretty much without the use of her hands for the first week or so while she healed up. She's back at work now so thats awesome!

I've been dying to get a new phone, I have had all sorts of troubles in the last week trying to get it - a HTC Touch Pro. I've given up for the time being. I've been told it is now obsolete. So I'll save up and buy the next version of it.

Bah I'm going to get out more. Camping style here we come.

I've been thinking about starting a project, though as usual I am probably over-thinking it a little and will likely defeat myself with the complexity required at some point in the next couple of weeks/months/whatever.

Anyway I'll try and keep it simple and start it at the beginning and work from there. If you bug me enough I might write about it again later.

Well, I finally got sick of being tethered to the router.

The wireless cards I have tend not to work really well with my work laptop. I think it has something to do with the WPA2 encryption I use not working with WinXP SP2 on my (work) laptop. I have a feeling that SP2 doesn't support WPA2 properly, or at least not on my laptop.

I eventually got my wireless card working, a Dlink GWL-G630 rev E PCMCIA card. The "latest" driver on Dlink's website is at least 3 years old, and doesn't support WPA2. Fortunately Ralink (the card uses a Ralink RT256x chipset) provides some excellent support for all platforms, including the latest drivers and utilities for Windows.

I first tried to get Jess's PCMCIA card set up. It's a Belkin F5D7010au rev 1xxx card (believe me when I say all those extra bits on the name actually matter on Belkin's website), which uses a Broadcom 43xx chipset. This is interesting because my linux laptop uses a so-called 4318 chipset (which is actually the pci device id of the chipset).

A while back I got frustrated searching for the latest Windows driver for this chipset (Broadcom 4318 - the files are named bcmwl5.sys/inf). Broadcom make a point of not releasing "generic" drivers, instead leaving it to the card manufacturers to bundle the latest versions. Most manufacturers are like Dlink above, only posting the most archaic drivers on their website ("But they're tested and compatible" they say! phah!) It turns out HP use Broadcom chipsets for quite a lot of their laptops. Finding the drivers for them on the website is pretty hit and miss.

Helpfully, HP still maintain Compaq's "Softpaq" repository. Who knows what sort of bizarre dewey-decimal system is used in there. In any case, I figured out a way to burrow out the latest version of the driver in there. I posted here about how to do it. It helps that for a lot of drivers in there, they add a text file with a heap of details, including which driver its superseding.

I know its a lot of explanation on doing something that really, really, is not that important. And it may have taken about eight hours to download and sift through all that stuff ... but I just wanted to post about it. Kind of a reminder to myself :p

I'd really like to have a giant whiteboard in our unit to draw diagrams and write lists and stuff.

The only downside I can see to this is that our place will end up looking like Sheldon & Leonard's in Big Bang Theory.

Jess asked me a couple months ago about getting one. I pointed out that whiteboards use more or less the same material that covers our fridge, and that using a whiteboard marker on the fridge isn't going to hurt it.

Only two sides of the fridge are exposed but both have a tendency to be covered in whiteboard marker now =)

I still would like a much bigger one that I could hang somewhere.

Oh, and I am having a serious love affair with Google's Chrome web browser.

I haven't taken to humping the laptop screen yet but I may have been caught nuzzling it once or twice. I am having a lot of trouble finding faults with it.

The sound on my linux laptop died last night so I have ditched that and - almost with glee I might add - am now back to my work laptop which runs Windows and has Chrome installed.

I just updated Opera on linux to the bleeding edge version, which still has the same problems as the previous bleeding edge version (namely, occasionally flash objects cause it to hoover up cpu time and destroy the system).

In disgust I switched back to FF in linux and uninstalled everything except Adblock and locationbar2.

And then the sound died so I had a reason to go back to playing with Chrome in Windows. C'mon Google! Release Chrome for linux already! (the codeweavers port uses an old version - and its still a windows app running on linux) Give me a reason to fix my linux laptop!

Well, today I finally got to do the registration on the DC5000, or the Malta as FXA have codenamed it (and I tend to just use the codenames all the time, its easier than trying to differentiate between, for example, the DC450 and the DCC450 ... sigh ... Nausicaa and Kutani if you must know). Registration is the process of making the image fit on a page square and line up with the image on side 2. Keywords like skew, perpendicularity, and magnification abound.

The other senior tech and I kind of decided, seeing as how the ruler we ordered to help us do registration on it isn't likely to turn up anytime soon, to just go ahead and have a stab at it.

Both of us, when we did training on this machine, were able to access a high precision ruler with graduations down to .1mm. Thats each mm separated into 10 more. It means you have to use at least a 10x loupe to be able take measurements. This is the ruler we have ordered.

So we found a loupe at work (a 25x pen-type affair) and the customer had a ruler with .5mm graduations on it (each mm separated in two). The ruler was about 2mm thick so this made things interesting. At 25x, you can focus on the marks on the ruler or the lines on the page. Not both. At .5mm graduation, at best you just have to guess where that line intersects the ruler.

The result was pretty good I thought. Magnification is still a bit out, but everything else looks good.

Last night, I thought I might see if I could google up a business that can make a ruler with .1mm graduations. No dice. I spent quite a while framing different queries and nothing turned up beyond a nice .5mm graduated ruler from Schaedler and a company that custom makes rulers. When emailed, I was told they only did .25mm graduated rulers, despite their web page stating different (up to 1/100 mm graduations, or .01mm, apparently). I'm still waiting on a reply about that discrepancy.

In any case, totally disappointed. Tonight was loupes, and they were much more popular. Cheap plastic ones go for as little as $12 or so. Found a good quality 10x for about $50, which looks good. Might even get one for myself.

Welcome to my geeky little world of high precision rulers.

Am up late again. Couldn't sleep earlier as I was too hot and sweaty. Still not achieving a great body temp even with the a/c going.

I'm not sure what my mood is. I thought I was a little depressed but I honestly don't know. It is somewhere between tired, depressed, annoyed and nonchalant.

Coming back to Mackay to work was a big blow to me. It's kind of like going from attending a great school like ... the Culinary Institute of America, being inspired and learning so much you think your head is going to explode. And then returning back to your little town, and working in a greasy spoon diner.

Still got to deal with the same annoying people as before. Still have to pander to the same personality quirks. Where I work, there's only one or two people who share my passion for geekiness. Granted, in Melbourne I was but one in a crowd of people but at least they were all just as geeky as me (if not more). I've just been keeping my head down, doing my work and trying to avoid people as much as possible.

Sure, the grass is always greener. I don't know what to make of it. It still seems like an industry worth remaining a part of. I could always learn a couple of new programming languages and maybe earn some money from that. Or have a go at starting my own business.

Random 2am musings. At least I got it out of my system.